Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Rea Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Lords Chamber

I know that there is a later amendment which proposes that, if there is a member of the executive or a civil servant with public health expertise on the board, the current amendment might not be necessary. I do not agree. I think it is absolutely necessary that the public health specialist on the board is there independently, to give an independent view.

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, I support all those noble Lords who have spoken so far and I agree with everything they have said; there is hardly anything for me to add. I just want to emphasise that a public health specialist will have had special experience and training in dealing with the massive amount of health data that comes into a health authority or, in this case, to the NHS Commissioning Board; it will be a huge amount. Public health specialists are trained in statistics and in epidemiology, and have other skills needed to handle this information and to help the board to make the correct decisions. I would like to emphasise the point made by my noble friend Lord Warner that very often this can be extremely helpful when certain services are deemed no longer appropriate. They may save a lot of money by giving backing to decommissioning and reconfiguring certain services, ensuring that populations are best served with the resources that are available.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, it sounds as though there is a considerable level of agreement on this. I, too, believe that we should have a public health specialist sitting on the board. Members of the faculty have said that if there is not going to be such a specialist on the board by right, there should at least be one where the CMO is not a public health specialist. This Bill has put public health at its core and at every level.

I shall not say any more about the public health appointment but I will talk a little about the involvement of the patient. The patient is also meant to be fundamental to this Bill: “no decision about me without me.” Again, we have the patient involved through local government and the local commissioning groups but not necessarily on the board. I think that whoever is chair of HealthWatch England should have a seat on the board.

What would both of these positions bring to the board? They would bring a level of expertise that nobody else has. I understand the Government’s reluctance to be specific, and I know that lists are problematic. I also know that with these things there is a tendency to request that every man and his dog, or all and sundry, sit around the board table. However, it is a board table and not a representative council, so I would put those two people there for one distinct reason: they add a dimension that the board does not know it misses. Decisions made without them will be made in a vacuum and will be all the poorer for it. Somebody put it to me earlier today—your Lordships will have to excuse me for this—that the board knows what it knows, it knows what it does not know, and it does not know what it does not know.