Coronavirus

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I like my right hon. Friend very much and wish that that were true. The reason why the Office for National Statistics does the surveillance testing is to ensure that we are constantly looking, on a national representative sample, at what the case rate is, as well as, of course, using the tests, and as we increase the testing numbers, we will inevitably find more of the cases that are there. The ONS survey published on Friday shows a rise in the numbers commensurate with the rise in the numbers of tests that have come back positive, and that does take into account the point about false positives, which is an important one.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Work is under way to set up a walk-through testing centre at Glasgow Caledonian University in my constituency, but with universities now returning, what additional capacity is being put in place to deal with what could be an additional surge of tests that need to be processed?

[Matt Hancock]

We are working with universities to try to ensure that testing is available as appropriate. Of course, that has to follow the wider prioritisation, but it is very important that universities right across the UK are ready for the return of students, including with testing, where that is appropriate, and we are working on that right now.

Covid-19 Update

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

That completes the statement. Thank you, everyone.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Earlier, during his response to my urgent question, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), stated that there were no confirmed cases of covid-19 among people living in Glasgow hotels. I have a constituent who has been in a hotel in Glasgow city centre and who has had covid-19 diagnosed. Is there a way of putting it on record that the Minister had perhaps had the wrong information provided to him when he said that no people had had covid-19 in hotel accommodation? Mr Speaker, will you be able to ask the Minister to come and correct the record, because my constituent has certainly had covid-19 and has isolated in a Glasgow city centre hotel?

Covid-19 Response

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am delighted to say that the statistics published by the Office for National Statistics this morning show that the proportion of covid deaths in social care is falling, and that is very good news. I am very grateful to all those working in social care, and those working in local authorities to support those in social care, in Dudley and throughout the country. We have put in billions of pounds of extra funding, including £600 million just 10 days ago. We have to make sure that we support those working in social care, who look after some of the most vulnerable.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

A growing number of constituents are getting in touch with me to express their concerns about the Public Health England report and the impact of coronavirus on ethnic minorities. The death rates of black and minority ethnic people are in many ways connected to people who have no recourse to public funds; people who are forced out to work when it is less safe for them to do so, because they are not entitled to statutory sick pay; and people who are in lower-paid jobs and, as in the case of Belly Mujinga, are less able to complain to their employers about their circumstances. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is one thing to say that black lives matter but quite another when he forces them out to work with no alternative?

[Matt Hancock]

It is very important that we look all the risk factors, including ethnicity, that have an impact. Indeed, that is what our broad approach has been, led by our shielding programme, whereby we have said that those who are most vulnerable should not leave the house at all until we were able to say this weekend—I am pleased to say—that it is safe for them to go, as long as they stay two metres apart from others.

Covid-19

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The shielding measures, where we insist on the lowest possible social contact, are for people who have existing conditions and will be contacted by the NHS. For those over 70 who are healthy and, for instance, in work, as my hon. Friend says, we strongly advise them to minimise their social contact.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

To prevent people from stockpiling and panic buying infant formula, will the Secretary of State speak to supermarkets and perhaps insist that they limit sales to two per family? In the event that breastfeeding support groups are unable to meet, will he direct people to the national breastfeeding helpline, which runs from 9.30 am to 9.30 pm every day?

[Matt Hancock]

I will look into the second point. On the first point, those conversations are happening.

Coronavirus

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

If Members continue to be pithy, we will get everybody in.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Last week I asked the Secretary of State about the advice given about coronavirus to DWP decision makers. We were not particularly reassured by the answers given by Department for Work and Pensions Ministers this morning, and that advice has still not appeared in our inboxes. Can he please follow that up?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes.

Coronavirus

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

In the first instance, the best thing to do if you think you have coronavirus is not to go to a hospital or GP surgery but to ring 111, wherever you are in the UK. My hon. Friend is quite right on the other point he made.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I am strongly in favour of getting the habitually clarty to wash their hands, so I am glad that the Secretary of State is reinforcing that message. May I ask him specifically about the advice to Department for Work and Pensions decision makers? What advice has been circulated within the DWP, and can all elected Members get a copy of it, just in case any of our constituents find that that advice is not being followed through?

[Matt Hancock]

I will take that issue up with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

NHS Funding Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good point about cutting away at prevention services. One of the services in England that has seen huge cuts is breastfeeding support. If such services are properly invested in, they can be a huge investment for the future of health, as well as for the here and now.

[Dr Whitford]

My hon. Friend does a lot of work on this topic. There is no doubt that a lot of investment must go into children’s earliest year, because our risk of so many conditions in later life is actually laid down between conception and the age of two. Energy and funding should therefore be focused at that point.

We have been waiting for three years for the promised Green Paper on social care, and there was absolutely nada in the Queen’s Speech. But this is a discussion about how to come up with an innovative system of raising the funds for social care. It is not an argument about whether social care needs to be funded. The answer is quite simple: it does. The gap is currently more than £6 billion. As well as spending more on health in Scotland, we also spend £130 a head more on social care, but that allows us to provide free personal care, which allows people to stay in their own homes and live their later life with dignity, where they want to be—where we would all want to be if we needed support. Last April, this care was extended to people under the age of 65 who need it because they have degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis or motor neurone disease. This would be a worthwhile investment for the UK Government to consider, because we simply cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care.

The Prime Minister enjoys trumpeting his 40 new hospitals, when we know that there will actually be six, but there is no mention of additional capital funding to cover the more than £6 billion backlog in maintenance and repairs that the shadow Secretary of State described so vividly; one could almost smell some of the problems he was describing. This backlog built up when NHS trusts slid into £2.5 billion of debt after the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, because the transactional costs—the bidding and contracting—were taking so much money away from the frontline. Year after year, we saw this repeated movement from capital to resource just to keep services afloat. That has to be stopped.

The biggest challenge in all four health services is workforce shortages, and that challenge is already being made worse both by Brexit—with a 90% drop in European nurses and European dentists coming to this country—and by the issues around pension tax reforms that are driving senior clinicians, particularly doctors, to cut their hours and their shifts. These factors are making workforce shortages an acute issue. In their manifesto, the Government committed to 50,000 extra nurses, and we saw the Secretary of State leaping up and down in delight, boasting about it. We are to expect the extra nurses over the next five years, but the problem is that we are still waiting for the 5,000 extra GPs that were promised for the last five years, and there are actually 1,000 fewer GPs in England than there were five years ago.

Everyone should welcome the expansion of the nursing workforce from 280,000 to 330,000, whether it is done through recruitment or training, or whether it is due to retention; I do not have an issue with that. But this expansion was costed in the manifesto at £879 million. Now, I am sure that everyone welcomes the return of the nursing bursary, even if it is only half of that which we provide in Scotland. Unlike in Scotland, nursing students in England will still have to pay tuition fees, which is likely to deter some mature students, who have a tendency to specialise in mental health and learning difficulties—areas of huge nursing shortage. It is not clear what the £879 million is actually for. Surely it cannot be for the salaries, because they would each cost only £17,500 a year, which is not even the real living wage. If it is for training and the bursary, have the Government forgotten to add the salaries into this Bill, because 50,000 extra nurses is a significant hike in the NHS salary bill? If it is the former and they are planning to recruit on a salary of £17,500 a year, then good luck with recruiting anybody.

This Government simply need to reverse the real-terms cuts they have made over the past decade. On a point of principle, they also need to go back to discussing funding of the Department of Health and Social Care in the round, not picking out the NHS in England to make it sound like a big number while cutting everything else. It is critical to invest in prevention and in social care, so a return to departmental spending and departmental investment would be very welcome. In all of this, they need to make sure that they are wrapping services around the patient. The patient is the person who should be at the centre of NHS and social care.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Will the Secretary of State speak to his colleagues in the Home Office and get them to allow Glasgow City health and social care partnership to open a supervised drug consumption room in my constituency and get vulnerable people into a service that will keep them alive?

[Jo Churchill]

We currently have no plans to change the law on drug consumption rooms. We support a range of evidence-based approaches to reducing the health-related harms associated with drug misuse. I keenly await the summit in Glasgow, which will focus on tackling problem drug use and bring together the experts we need. Dame Carol Black’s report is out in the next few weeks, but putting better resources into treatment and recovery is vital and I urge the Scottish Government to invest.

Baby Loss Awareness Week

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Patricia Gibson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The point I am trying to make is that because we know that these mental health challenges very often arise following baby loss, there is no reason why the infrastructure should not be in place for when these issues arise. Sometimes the demand is immediate, and sometimes it is months or years after. Sometimes people will choose not to call on these services, but the infrastructure needs to be there to ensure that people have access to it in a timely fashion.

Someone pointed out to me today a comment on social media from a chap who spoke about “awareness day fatigue”, but he also acknowledged the importance of those with lived experience feeling able and willing to speak about their experience of baby loss, because this can encourage others to talk of their own loss and perhaps seek the support and help they need. We with lived experience who choose to talk about it can also prevent others from going through the awful experience we had by raising that awareness, to stop other people joining the terrible club of which no one would ever wish to be a member.

Raising awareness is very important. It is not and must not ever become some trite stock phrase, although it may sometimes sound so. It is important because every day I wish to God that I had had some more awareness of pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome. I may then have been in a better position—I am sure many mothers would say the same—to articulate what was happening to me, instead of being told by the Southern General Hospital that I was wasting their time when I turned up on the day I was due to deliver my baby and that the terrible pain I was in was normal. What did I expect? It wasn’t labour—go home and lie down. Could I not see they were busy? Had I known more about pre-eclampsia, I would have been able to ask to be checked specifically for that condition, because I was not tested for it. I would have been more assertive, instead of being made to feel like an hysterical older expectant mother.

Raising awareness really does matter. Information matters because it can make a difference between life and death. We know that, too often, mothers are not listened to. Raising awareness cannot be seen as a trite phrase or a box-ticking exercise, and I know that many who have lived with the loss of their baby would say exactly the same.

The chap commenting on these matters on social media is right to say that the lack of mental health support must be addressed. We cannot be discharging mums to send them home to their partners and families and leave them to get on with it. They must have the mental health support they need to help them navigate as best they can the biggest loss and the most appalling experience it is possible for them to have.

We have, over the years, come a distance in the realms of baby loss. We have, with some success, shone a light on it and worked to remove the taboo, but we still need to do more to ensure that the isolation of grief does not swallow up those affected by this loss, which goes against everything that nature would suggest. We need to continue to work to break down the isolation, and we can do that with the proper mental health support to help those affected to find their way back to some semblance of normality and find a path through their fog of grief, so that they can rebuild their lives, albeit around the loss that they have suffered.

It is shocking to learn that the majority of bereaved parents who need help cannot access it in an appropriate place and at an appropriate time. This is because perinatal mental health services are focused on women who are pregnant or have a live baby. Last week in the debate on women’s mental health, many of us spoke about new mums needing mental health support—and that is true: they do—but this need not mean and must not mean that those mums whose babies have died are forgotten. They must not be forgotten; they must be given the support they need because we know that they are at risk of developing mental health challenges. We need to do more to ensure that the mental health infrastructure they need is in place to support them. Women who have experienced stillbirth, miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy are at a higher risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression than those who have not. They also display clinically significant levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms from five to 18 years after stillbirth.

As I was reading some of the testimony from the Lullaby Trust in preparation for this debate, from women who had suffered stillbirth and described walking out of the hospital with no further contact about the support they might need, I recognised that because that, too, was my experience. I did not feel able to discuss my experience or participate in counselling, but that was just as well because it was never offered. In my case, the hospital was trying to dodge questions and withhold information about how my baby died.

In response to the point made by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who is no longer in his place, the demand for coroners’ inquests—or, in Scotland, fatal accident inquiries—into stillbirths, where they are deemed to be in the public interest, has risen only because of hospital trusts and health boards pulling down the shutters when things go wrong. That is where that demand comes from, and that has to stop: it has to change. Parents do not want to consult a lawyer when their baby dies; they just want to know what went wrong and how it can be avoided. That is something health boards and health trusts really need to do more to get their head around.

I am pleased that in Scotland there has been new investment in perinatal mental health to ensure that there is support for bereaved parents prior to discharge and that there is appropriate signposting to third sector services that can provide bereavement and other mental health support. We can no longer turn a blind eye to or overlook those who fall through the gaps in our health system. There must be psychological support for those affected by the death of a baby if they need it.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I commend her bravery in speaking up on this again; I know how hard that is for her. Does she agree with me that there needs to be support for women entering a subsequent pregnancy after that as well? That could be quite retraumatising for some women and quite challenging to deal with, and they need special support for that as well.

[Patricia Gibson]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I think she has made an excellent point. The shadow of a stillbirth will hang over any subsequent pregnancy, should it take place, and we need to be mindful of that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Yes. What the hon. Lady has just outlined to me flies in the face of the advice that I and the clinical directors of NHS England are giving CCGs. We are clear that voluntary sector provision of additional services is crucial in the support of people with mental ill health. Unfortunately, some commissioners seem to want to medicalise everything, but that is not the key to good treatments, and I will look into it.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The prevention Green Paper talks about the risk of an opioid epidemic. In Scotland, we feel that that is already here, with 1,187 deaths in Scotland last year, 394 of them in Glasgow. Will the Secretary of State work with the Scottish Government and Glasgow health and social care partnership and support the opening of a medically supervised drug consumption room in Glasgow?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, the risk of an opioid epidemic across the UK is a serious one. We have seen that risk materialise in the United States. I was as shocked as anyone to see the recent figures for the growth in opioid addiction in Scotland. While public health and the NHS are devolved to the Scottish Government, and they must lead on tackling this issue, for the UK elements of my responsibilities, we in England will do absolutely everything we can and put aside all party politics to tackle this serious problem.