Vaccinations and Health Screening Services

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

I learned so much from the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for tabling this debate.

When I put my name down for this I realised that I had a vaccination schedule pinned to my fridge. It has every vaccination that your child has to have between birth and five years of age. I cannot tell you where I got it from; I imagine I must have got it when my last daughter was born. I realised with a certain degree of guilt that is uniquely gifted to mothers—perhaps that is why this debate is all-women—that I had forgotten to book my third daughter in for her three years and four months old vaccination. While listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, I also realised how lucky I was not to know what some of these diseases are. My generation has taken that for granted. I will of course rectify the fact that we need to have this vaccination—we are still in time.

It struck me that we spend so much time and energy in public life and politics talking about anti-vaccination fake news campaigns in social media and about how to tackle them. It is right that we fight them, but do we spend enough time, as the noble Baroness said, really focusing on the nitty-gritty of ensuring that the system for take-up works as efficiently and seamlessly as possible?

I cannot base my entire speech on mother’s instinct, so I was very pleased to have the briefing from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. It was most helpful, particularly in stressing the point about making every contact count. We need to think more deeply about the way we talk to pregnant women and parents at the start of their journey. By the time you go into the room to give your baby his or her first vaccinations, you are actually already quite a long way into the parenting journey and will usually have had quite a lot of interactions with midwives and health visitors. While I am not letting fathers off the hook in the slightest, we know that maternal health is vital to determinants of child health. What are the Government doing to ensure that health visitors and midwives have the training, confidence and space within those consultations to press the need for maternal immunisations, which do not get a lot of coverage, and then to start those early conversations about child vaccinations?

More broadly, so many of the messages that we aim at first-time mothers in particular—I do not aim this just at the Government but across charities and public life—focus on childbirth and breastfeeding. These are obviously very important, but it would much better to prepare parents for at least the next five years, not simply saying, “You just get to the other side of the delivery suite”. This is where the system-wide approach is crucial. What systems are in place to collect the data and remind parents along the way that vaccinations are due, and what methods are being used to support those who may just be struggling to navigate or access services? There is debate over whether we should exclude non-vaccinated children from schools, but are we missing the practicalities, including perhaps a more effective method of using the school or nursery entry check to ascertain children’s vaccination status and using that as a reminder or trigger for boosters?

I would have loved to have had more time to talk about screening. We need to look at public health as a whole. I happened to be shopping earlier this week and was in the beauty department of House of Fraser. When I made my purchase, I got an NHS card reminding me to go for cervical screening, which I am up to date with. However, can we not think more creatively about ways to get to people that do not just involve opening a letter from the NHS? We need to be much better at thinking laterally about what is going on in people’s lives. I thank the noble Baroness for initiating this conversation and hope that we get more opportunities to talk about this subject.