Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

I follow on from the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, by raising a question for the noble Lord, Lord Patel. Does he accept that if his amendments were accepted, for some of us that would run the risk of medicalisation of long-term conditions? I agree with him when he says that there needs to be a change in culture—culture is all important. What this Bill seeks to do is to break down a lot of the barriers between health and social care so that the health and well-being, in the broadest sense, of individuals, are improved. That is an enormously important step forward, not least because much of the preventive work needs to be done with the population, in terms of lifestyle and so on, to decrease admissions to the NHS. That is what has traditionally been carried out not by healthcare but by other agencies.

I throw the noble Lord a somewhat philosophical question. If his amendment were to be accepted, would that be an acceptance by the medical profession that health and social care need to work in a far more integrated fashion than they have ever done before to achieve what he would term health and clinical outcomes, to which I would add well-being outcomes?