NHS Long Term Plan

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, like many in your Lordships’ House, I owe my life to the NHS, so I am always glad of any opportunity to praise it, for which I thank my noble friend, as well as for his wonderful opening speech. I welcome any initiative that helps the NHS to thrive.

I shall confine my remarks to how I believe the plan will affect the 6 million carers who underpin any service provided by national or local agencies and whose contribution, as I never tire of reminding your Lordships’ House, is valued at £132 billion every year: roughly equivalent to all spending on the NHS.

Last year, Carers UK surveyed 7,000 carers and asked what they wanted from the NHS. They were clear that they wanted the long-term plan to turn the NHS into the most carer-friendly health service in the world, and that that would entail better recognition for carers, better identification of carers and more support for carers. I am very pleased that the long-term plan makes the specific commitment to be the most ambitious ever set of NHS commitments to carers.

The plan details how NHS England will improve how it identifies unpaid carers and strengthen support for them to help them address their individual health needs. It also identifies that carers are twice as likely to suffer from poor health themselves compared to the general population. To combat this, the quality marks for carer-friendly GP practices will help carers identify GP services that can accommodate their needs. There is also national adoption of carers’ passports, which will be helpful.

These are welcome initiatives, but the survey last year found that, even among those carers caring for more than 50 hours a week, as many as one in five said that their GP had no idea that they were a carer, and, even when they knew, only one in 10 had been given advice about where to get support. Can the Minister give more detail about how this identification will work in practice and what support will be given to GPs to enable them to give the help that I know they want to give?

The plan also promises better support for carers in emergencies, and support for young carers is also welcome. I want to know more about plans to support the thousands of carers who are in the NHS workforce. So many of them are juggling their work responsibilities with their unpaid caring responsibilities. Support for them in the workforce is vital if enough staff are to be retained to give the plan even a ghost of a chance of being delivered.

Other commitments in the plan also help carers: for example, social prescribing and the joining up and co-ordination of care. As ever, the important part is not the plan but how it will be implemented in local areas. The patchy record of STPs and integrated care systems may give us some anxiety about that. Above all, there is a real sense that this is a missed opportunity. This is a three-legged stool with only two legs. Alongside the NHS plan, we urgently need ambitious proposals for the funding and delivery of adult social care that have the huge contribution made by carers at their heart. The social care Green Paper, when published—I am tempted to say, if published—must set out concrete measures to support carers and give them practical support without putting their own lives on hold. The future of the NHS itself, as well as the system of social care, may depend on it.