Health and Care Bill

Ben Spencer Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Bristow]

I agree with the hon. Lady that surgeons work incredibly hard. What I am talking about is operating at the top of the licence and for our consultants to be able to do the things that we want them to do. She is absolutely right; they are doing vital work in other areas running clinics and so on, but ultimately what we have is an elective challenge, and we need to ensure that we spend as much time addressing that elective challenge.

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the challenges for primary care is that general practitioners have absorbed a great deal of the role of social advocacy in our society? People are trying to get a face-to-face GP appointment, and it is sometimes being suggested to them that such things as getting a fitness note or a letter to go to a school might be better served by someone else in the wider multi-disciplinary team. People are getting frustrated, because our messaging about how to use the health service and the different range of roles and responsibilities offered is sometimes getting a bit diluted.

[Paul Bristow]

My hon. Friend speaks with much experience and makes a powerful point. I think he would agree that that core admin function is not what he went into medicine to do. He went into medicine to treat patients. I am grateful that the Minister laid out some of the plans that the Government have to deal with this issue. It is right that we should be looking to the long term, and the 15-year framework for future workforce is to be welcomed, but there also needs to be a much more regular reporting mechanism attached to that to ensure that we as Members are informed, but more importantly the NHS is informed, about how that challenge is going. The integration between NHS England and Health Education England—aligning the delivery arm and the workforce capacity arm—is probably also the right thing to do.

I end with this point: the challenges around workforce will be addressed not only by employing and training more NHS staff, although that is crucial—that is why I have some sympathy for amendment 10—but by ensuring that we work more productively by asking clinicians to operate at the top of their licence. It is also about ensuring that the NHS works smarter. We have created organisations such as Getting It Right First Time and NICE and asked them to go away and do the hard work of coming up with the most cost-effective and efficient ways of delivering care. If we ask those organisations to come up with the pathways and the ways of doing these things, surely it is only right that the NHS then adopts them instead of sitting there and saying, “These things will not necessarily work here.” We ask experts to come up with the right way of performing procedures; I suggest we go ahead and adopt them.