Chris Bryant
Main Page: Chris Bryant (Labour - Rhondda and Ogmore)Department Debates - View all Chris Bryant's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(6 months ago)
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Victoria Atkins
I thank my right hon. Friend, who has been such a firm campaigner on these issues. Her constituents should be very pleased with everything that she has done to press upon me the importance of this matter. The community diagnostic centre is opening and will provide more tests, checks and scans for her local residents. I will take up those conversations, and I am very much looking forward to coming to visit her in the next Parliament to celebrate the opening of the centres.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Dame Rosie, in the words of “South Pacific”, if we ain’t got dames, where would we be?
In November 2021, Boris Johnson and the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir Sajid Javid) appointed me to co-chair a programme board to create a national strategy on acquired brain injury. This issue matters in every single one of our constituencies, and I am afraid we are still failing. Despite the months that have passed, it has not been possible to put the strategy together for a whole series of reasons, including churn of ministers and the fact that the Government are not able to put a single penny into it—not even enough money to check how many people suffer a brain injury every year. This is a cross-party issue. How can we ensure that later this year—regardless of who forms the Government—we end up with a national strategy for acquired brain injury, so that we do not just save people’s lives when they have been in a road traffic accident, but give them back the quality of life and independence that they so dearly deserve?