Care Bill [HL]

Debate between Viscount Ullswater and Lord Turnberg

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Ullswater)]

My Lords, I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed, I will not be able to call Amendments 2 and 3 because of pre-emption.

[Lord Turnberg]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 2. Before I do so, I should explain that I have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who cannot be in this place this evening because of illness in the family. I strongly support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Hunt, in particular the idea of a nurse on the boards; I also very strongly support his ideas on trying to attract good managers to stay in the service for as long as possible.

Amendment 2 is the first of several amendments that I have tabled emphasising the need for Health Education England and the local education and training boards to pay particular attention to the maintenance of standards and quality in education and training. I express my interests here as someone who has spent many years trying to raise standards of medical education in my previous jobs as dean of a medical school, the president of the Royal College of Physicians and, perhaps of equal significance, as president of the Medical Protection Society, where I was brought face to face with what happens when standards fail or are allowed to slip.

This amendment specifically concerns the membership of Health Education England and the need for it to include at least one person with expertise in research and another in education and training. I will save my remarks on research until we debate later amendments, but so far as education and training are concerned, my fear is that in the drive to meet workforce requirements and staffing numbers we will lose out on standards and quality. This amendment simply makes more explicit the need for input on the board of someone who has particular expertise about education and training, and the maintenance of standards.

I will make another point now to save making it later. I believe that there is a conflict, not easy to resolve, between the desire to provide sufficient numbers of trained staff locally—as determined, quite rightly, by local providers—and the need to maintain national standards. For example, in medicine it is vital that a cardiologist, orthopaedic surgeon, general physician or trained nurse is trained to a national standard that is recognised everywhere. It is not acceptable for a local provider to decide what training should consist of, but they want someone whom they can rely on. It is vital that there are national standards and hence there is a need for someone at the Health Education England level who has the expertise to look at how those standards can be set.

So far as national workforce planning is concerned, I have lived through innumerable efforts at medical workforce planning and found them to be fraught with difficulty, largely because it takes so long to train doctors: five or six years as undergraduates, then another five or 10 years of specialist or general training. Predicting need for different types of doctors 10 or 15 years downstream is far from straightforward. The noble Earl kindly sent around a document on a mandate from the Government to Health Education England. However, I fear that the section entitled “Excellent Education”, with its emphasis on training multipotential individuals working in teams across all health sectors—important though that is—de-emphasises the need for specialists. That prospect fills me with apprehension—that five years downstream we will have a health service lacking essential parts. I fear that the right balance between the need for general across-sector care and specialist care may be tipping too far in these particular aspirations. In any event, for the moment, I will press for the placing of relevant education expertise on the board of HEE, as suggested in this amendment.