Hospice and Palliative Care
Al Pinkerton Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Gregory Stafford
Well, the simple fact is that what the hon. Members and his Front-Bench team are doing is ensuring that the NHS is worse off, because raising the money will have a greater impact on the rest of the service. [Interruption.] The Minister for Care is shouting at me from the Front Bench, and I am sure that, in his response to the debate, he can outline whether he and his team knew about the national insurance contribution rises and whether they planned for them.
The other part of this is the workforce, who have been touched on briefly. There is a real shortage of qualified healthcare professionals. Vacancy rates for hospice nurses have risen to nearly 19%, and the corollary is that staff morale is low. Again, the Government need to make sure that the long-term workforce plan that they and the NHS are rolling out includes how we will ensure that hospice staff are part of the long-term funding. Hospice UK has warned, seriously, that without urgent action, some, indeed many, hospices may be forced to close their doors in the next 12 months.
I have some requests of the Government. First, as the hon. Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton) said, we need them to commit to a long-term sustainable funding model for hospices. That is not to say that hospices should be brought into the central NHS—I personally believe that the innovation of the hospice sector is down to its independence from the NHS—but they need multi-year funding to understand where they stand.
Secondly, as has been mentioned, we need to scrap the postcode lottery that comes from the integrated care boards. Some kind of ringfenced funding, particularly for children’s hospice grants, would prevent a lot of the delays and inequities in the service. As I said, we need to make sure that hospice staff are integrated into the NHS long-term workforce plan and are paid in parity with similar NHS roles.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
Will the hon. Gentleman join me in paying tribute to the Phyllis Tuckwell hospice, which does great work in his constituency and mine? I have been speaking to the hospice over the last few days, and it requires £25,000 a day to maintain its services. The hospice has told me that it desperately needs multi-year funding settlements to offer a guarantee of future financial security, as well as a clearly articulated workforce plan to ensure continuity of high-quality staff.
Gregory Stafford
I think I mentioned Phyllis Tuckwell at the beginning of my speech, so I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. It does fantastic work in Farnham and across Surrey and Hampshire. I am sure like all hospices around the country, it relies on donations but requires secure funding from the Government.
I welcome the £100 million of capital investment. We need to remember that hospices and palliative care are not a “nice to have.” They are absolutely essential charitable services, and they must be fully integrated into the funding and planning frameworks of the Department of Health and the NHS. They provide compassionate, life-changing care to thousands of adults and children every year. However, this vital work is being undermined by short-sighted Government policies.
If the Government are serious about improving end of life care and reducing hospital pressures, they must deliver fair funding, address workforce challenges and ensure that no family are left without the care they need, regardless of where they live. This is not just about numbers—the Minister might listen to this. It is about dignity, it is about compassion and it is about humanity at the most vulnerable time in people’s lives.
Access to Primary Healthcare
Al Pinkerton Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
For my constituents in Surrey Heath, access to primary care—whether GPs, dentists, pharmacies or optometrists—has increasingly become a postcode lottery. Vast dentistry deserts—maybe not of Saharan scale—have opened up across Surrey Heath, with residents simply unable to find an NHS dentist with an open list for them or their families. When a list does open up, it almost immediately closes again due to the overwhelming demand. Today, families are being forced to seek private provision for their dental care—if they are able to stretch their finances that far—or they simply forgo dental care altogether. During the recent election, I even met a constituent who had resorted to an amateur tooth extraction because of the lack of affordable dental treatment locally.
The postcode lottery extends to GP services too, although the issue of access takes on a slightly different form. Surrey Heath has some excellent and much-loved GP practices that are working hard to put the experiences of users first, but others have booking systems, triage mechanisms and approaches to communication that leave patients feeling anxious and frustrated.
I pay particular tribute to the surgery in Lightwater, a village in my constituency. Residents regale me routinely with stories about the fast, efficient and friendly telephone service it provides, the availability of on-the-day appointments and the generally high quality of the service. It is little wonder that residents from miles beyond Lightwater are so desperate to move their registration to that particular well-run surgery.
Some other surgeries, however, are not so highly praised. They are criticised for their impersonal online booking systems and inappropriately long waiting times for appointments, sometimes requiring patients to wait a month or so to see a GP. This is not just poor practice; it has real-life implications for the health outcomes of patients and for the economy, as residents take longer to be seen, longer to be treated, longer to recover, and longer to get back to work than if they had been seen earlier. Online booking systems risk creating a digital barrier to entry for our most vulnerable residents. It cannot be right that those requiring healthcare might be dissuaded from seeking it because of the complexity of approaching their GP, or because they do not have, cannot afford or cannot operate the technologies required to book an appointment.
Our local pharmacies, too, are under huge strain, and I commend the incredible local independent pharmacies who look after communities across Surrey Heath so well. I am incredibly pleased that we are having this debate today, not only to talk about the challenges of primary healthcare but to highlight some of the great practice that we can see within our communities. We need to support our local pharmacies, which deliver so much care and support, and we need, as the Liberal Democrat manifesto proposed, to enshrine the commitment that patients can see a GP within seven days—a commitment underpinned by an associated commitment to train and recruit thousands of GPs every year.