Health: Stroke Care

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 13th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the unwarranted variations in services are quite clearly unacceptable. The value of the CQC report is that it shines a spotlight on where variations in care need to be addressed. We believe that that will help all stakeholders involved in improving opportunities for people who have experienced a stroke. As regards post-hospital care, on which the noble Baroness rightly focuses, the accelerating stroke improvement programme, which is quite new, is already doing very good work. It was developed specifically to improve care in areas where progress needs to be faster, and that work will most certainly continue.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

My Lords, has the Minister yet had a chance to reflect upon this morning’s report that illustrates that survival rates and the reduction in the death rate from strokes, cancer, heart attacks and many other serious diseases have improved considerably over the past few years? By any standards, when comparing productivity in terms of quantity and quality, there has been a huge increase in productivity. Since the premise behind the Health and Social Care Bill was that there had been little or no increase in productivity in the National Health Service, will he share with us his reflections on that report?

[Earl Howe]

The premise of the Health and Social Care Bill is rather different from the one that the noble Lord cites. We believe that there is a damaging and avoidable variation in care across the country. Of course the outcomes in many areas of clinical care have improved immeasurably, as he rightly says, over the past few years—not least in heart attack and stroke. However, we still have some way to go and clinical commissioning, we believe, will take us in the right direction. Stroke features in two of the domains in the NHS outcomes framework, representing work that we have put in train: domain 1, “Preventing people from dying prematurely”; and domain 3, “Helping people to recover from episodes of ill health or following injury”. It is those measures to which the NHS will be held to account.