Healthcare

Baroness Miller of Hendon Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Hendon]

My involvement with the National Health Service is that five years before I joined your Lordships’ House I was the chairman of a local family health service authority in Barnet. I was responsible there for overseeing what went on in the general practices, working with National Health Service doctors and dentists and with pharmacies. We initiated a new scheme in the pharmacies called High Street Health. This scheme spread around the country, but was started in Barnet.

I was also for some four years the chairman of the national league of hospital and community friends. The branches of hospital friends consist of those tireless volunteers who work in our National Health Service hospitals, providing all kinds of patient services and comfort, running news stands, and raising money for patient amenities and even sometimes for much needed equipment. In other words, they were acting as the big society more than 60 years ago, although we now hear so much about it being a new idea.

From my contact with the dedicated workers in the friends organisations and in my work in a local health authority, I have knowledge of what patients and users want. Of course, I do not have medical knowledge; mine comes from a completely different angle. The White Paper, which I think is an excellent consultation, talks a lot about outcomes but I can tell the Government what outcomes patients want. First, they want to get better; as part of the process of getting better, they want a GP who knows them personally, with the kind of friendship that I and my family have been lucky enough to have with our local doctor. If they go into hospital, they want it to be clean and germ free so that they are not in danger of coming out in a worse condition than when they went in. As has been mentioned by others, they want an end, once and for all—and without delay—to the scandal of mixed wards. Numerous Health Secretaries on both sides—I am not accusing any one Government of this—have promised it but it has not been delivered. There is no excuse for this third-world arrangement. It is not appropriate; it is an inexcusable penny-saving matter.

Another outcome that patients want is that the National Health Service will provide medication when they need it. They do not want to find that treatments are available in some parts of the UK but not in other parts, or that they are denied to United Kingdom residents but are freely available on the continent.

The training of future doctors is a matter of equal concern. Without being in any way chauvinistic, the public want fluent English-speaking doctors. The working time directive, which limits the hours that poor young trainee doctors are able to work, is having an adverse effect on their ability to gain the skills they need to become specialists themselves.

I regret to say that the National Health Service has been a political football between the parties for far too long. It should stop. No party has done exactly as much as it should. Let us hope that this consultation will provide what is needed for this, as my noble friend said, patient-centred and led health service.