All 2 Baroness Wyld contributions to the Health and Care Act 2022

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Wed 26th Jan 2022
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Mon 7th Mar 2022
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Health and Care Bill

Baroness Wyld Excerpts
Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 26th January 2022

(2 years, 7 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Health and Care Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 71-VI(a) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Sixth Marshalled List) - (26 Jan 2022)
Baroness Wyld Portrait Baroness Wyld (Con)
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My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Farmer. I declare my interest as a non-executive member of the board of Ofsted. I apologise for not being able to speak at Second Reading for my own family reasons. I echo everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said. It was a real pleasure to serve with her on the Public Services Committee.

I will praise the Government first, which is always wise. They are showing great commitment to family hubs and I believe that they are committed to the rollout. What concerned me when the committee took evidence from certain members of the Government was a sense of a lack of urgency. Everybody agreed that this was a brilliant idea, but different people from different departments had different ideas about how they should work.

We also took evidence from families, in private and in public. The stories we heard over and again were, as others have alluded to, that, “This could have been prevented if it had been addressed in a joined-up way”. We particularly heard from young children, “I had to tell my story over and again.” Imagine the trauma. This could have been prevented under a different model. These situations did not have to happen.

We have the building blocks to make sure that these situations do not happen, but I do not think the legislative framework is in place to help us to address that. For that reason, I am persuaded by my noble friend Lord Farmer and I am happy to support his amendment.

Lord Mawson Portrait Lord Mawson (CB)
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My Lords, I am very supportive of what the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said. My colleagues and I have been in this space for 37 years and we have built rather a lot of things in it. It has been very interesting to watch what happened in east London, when this new scheme from a new Government arrived in the middle of a group of communities that already had well-established relationships with very vulnerable families, with a whole range of opportunities emerging. I am sure it was unintentional—it is part of the danger of being overinfluenced by the idea that local authorities will sort this stuff out in the same old usual way that they have tried to before—but it was very disruptive for the social enterprise sector, which was already doing this stuff very effectively, with all the numbers to show it. I will not go into the detail now, but when you look at the detail of what actually happened, the present facilities cost £100,000 more than those being delivered by the social enterprise sector.

These ideas are really important. I am happy to take the noble Lord into this in a lot more detail. I encourage him to spend more time in the detail in some real places to look at the unintended consequences of what happens when new government programmes arrive in communities, with the best will in the world, with an overconfidence in what they think the state can deliver. I am very happy to have a further conversation with the noble Lord, but the detail of the long-term relationships with these families really matters.

Health and Care Bill

Baroness Wyld Excerpts
Lord Mawson Portrait Lord Mawson (CB)
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My Lords, just before the Minister stands, I rise to support Amendment 184ZA in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege.

Over the last 28 years, it has been my privilege to work with a fantastic team of GPs in the East End of London who are now responsible for 43,000 patients. I know what great GPs and doctors are like. If I am honest, however, I have also had to deal with a number of dodgy doctors, which is a very difficult matter to deal with. One doctor undertook female circumcision in his practice, unbeknown to the health authority for quite a period of time. He ended up marrying his practice manager and, some years later, he murdered her. Another practice, when I dug under the carpet, had bought a cheap fridge from B&Q and, over a period of three years, kept 10,000 injections at the wrong temperature and injected 10,000 patients with dead, illegal injections. Another doctor, as we learned when we took over his list, had countless ghost patients. As a result, I started to discover what ghost patients are. It took our team two years to sort out the realities of who were and were not real patients.

For the sake of GPs and patients, we need to protect them in the way the noble Baroness is suggesting. Doctors are flawed human beings like the rest of us, and we need to protect them from themselves and from us. It is really important that these things are taken seriously. This amendment puts its finger on a very important matter.

Baroness Wyld Portrait Baroness Wyld (Con)
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My Lords, this morning, I told my three daughters that they needed to be more assertive at school, but I have completely failed to intervene tonight. I will be very quick in paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and my noble friend Lord Lansley, who is not here tonight, and in thanking the Government for the amendments on cosmetic interventions. I sponsored the Botulinum Toxin and Cosmetic Fillers (Children) Bill in this House, which assisted with the regulation of non-surgical interventions for children. At the time, we said that this was only the start and that there was a lot more to do. We acknowledged that others had done a lot of spade work, and I pay tribute to all those who have done yet more spade work. I want to put on record my appreciation to the Government for listening and reacting.

Baroness Greengross Portrait Baroness Greengross (CB)
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I will be very brief because this is a slightly different subject. I shall speak to Amendment 181, which places a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that each hospital has sufficient accommodation for patients who are rehabilitating and no longer require a hospital bed but still have needs. Further, as part of this duty, the Secretary of State must ensure that any spare land owned by the NHS is considered for this use.

In Scandinavia, patient accommodation of this nature has been part of the state health system since the late 1980s. Having patients stay in these facilities, which are designed to cater for people still needing some medical care, has delivered considerable savings to the public health system. The savings from these facilities is significant. In the previous group, much of our discussion—as always—was about the cost of our health and care system to the taxpayer, and to those who need care. This amendment, as well as delivering better rehabilitation and care for someone recovering from being in hospital, also delivers a significant saving. As I pointed out in Committee, NHS trusts are currently spending money putting up patients in hotels, with rooms costing as much as £275 a night. One London hospital has spent over £1 million on hotel rooms in the last three years. The cost of someone staying in a hospital bed for longer than they need is even greater than that. This is something that I would very much like to take up further with the Government.

Over the last few years, I have been working with a chartered architect who has identified various sites where this could happen throughout England. One is not terribly far from here. This is a real opportunity and I hope the Government will take it to include this as part of the Bill.