Social Mobility (Wales)

Debate between Chris Ruane and Madeleine Moon

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane]

I am afraid I have almost taken my 10 minutes, but I thank the Minister for the work that he has done on the growth deal.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (in the Chair)]

Order. I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s excellent speech, but he does in fact have 15 minutes, should he require them.

[Chris Ruane]

Then I will give way to the Minister.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Chris Ruane and Madeleine Moon

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I wish to speak on four matters in today’s debate on the Queen’s Speech. The first—heart-related issues—has already been mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) and by the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), who is no longer in her place. I am the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on heart disease, which was set up 12 years ago. I give credit to the Government for consulting on minimum pricing of alcohol and on plain packaging for cigarettes and tobacco. Both those consultations have been good, engaging MPs from all parties and, indeed, the wider community, but the Government have lost a golden opportunity to put these measures in this year’s Queen’s Speech.

Over the past 10 or 12 years, we have had a fantastic record on heart disease, with deaths going down by 46%. We have taken some big and bold decisions: for example, the Labour Government passed a measure to ban smoking in public places; we also introduced statins, which are largely responsible for the 46% drop in heart-related deaths. We must keep up the momentum, however, and minimum pricing of alcohol and plain packaging of cigarettes could have helped us to do so.

Each year, about 11,000 10 to 15-year-old children in Wales take up smoking. The industry wants to catch those smokers young and keep them smoking until they are 55, 65 or until they die, in order to keep up profits. Those young people have been deliberately targeted. The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned the use of defibrillators and the teaching of resuscitation skills in schools. If the Government made progress on those, it would help to keep up our excellent momentum on tackling heart disease in the UK.

Many Members have touched on immigration and some have connected it with the health service. There will not be one of us in this Chamber whose life has not been touched by an immigrant worker in the NHS. My doctor for 25 years, Dr Rao—sadly, now passed away—came from the Indian subcontinent, while the man who delivered my first-born child was an Egyptian consultant, and I am really grateful to both of them. If all the immigrants working in the national health service left tomorrow, our national health service would collapse. I pay tribute, too, to the Filipino workers in the care sector—lovely, family-orientated people, who have great respect and great compassion for the elderly. Immigration is an issue throughout the country and we need to reflect concern about it in Parliament. What we do not need to do is add to it. We certainly do not need to whip it up, as I feel some Members have done today.

I praise the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire for what she said about cancer treatments. I pay tribute to the work of my constituent Mike Peters, a friend of mine, who has had cancer twice in his life and currently has a chronic leukaemia condition. Mike is spearheading an international campaign to increase the number of donors of matching blood cells for leukaemia treatment. He has set up two organisations, the Love Hope Strength Foundation and Delete Blood Cancer UK. He is a rock star who is a lead singer in The Alarm and Big Country, and he tries to recruit people when he sings in countries around the world. He has personally recruited 35,000 donors, mainly in America, through his concerts, and 500 people’s lives have been saved as a result.

Mike is holding an event in Room R in Portcullis House on Tuesday 4 June. Anyone—any Member of Parliament!—aged between 17 and 55 will be welcome to become a donor. All it takes is a mouth swab. The DNA is then kept on file, so that anyone in this or any other country who needs stem cells will be able to gain access to them. Let me again pay tribute to the work that Mike Peters has done.

I now want to say something about how mindfulness can help with problems related to health and social care. Members may ask “What is mindfulness?” Mindfulness is an integrative mind-body-based approach which helps people to change the way they think and feel about their experiences, especially stressful experiences. It involves paying attention to our thoughts and feelings so that we become more aware of them, less enmeshed in them, and better able to manage them. It uses breath as an anchor to slow down the mind and body and to help us to live in the present moment, rather than being chased by our past or worried by our future. It is the perfect way to combat stress—and the impact of stress on heart problems, cancer and mental health conditions is massive.

Members may think that that sounds a bit airy-fairy, but the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has backed mindfulness as a better way of treating repeat-episode depression than drug therapy. It puts the individual in control. It is as cheap as drug therapy in the short term, and cheaper in the long term. It has no known side-effects, and, if taught early enough, it is preventive. Let me give the House some statistics. A total of 32.3% of people aged between 15 and 25 suffer from one or more psychological conditions. Every Member in the Chamber will know someone with such a condition, perhaps even a family member. In 1991, 9 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were issued; in 2011, 46 million were issued. That is a 500% increase in 20 years.

[Mrs Moon]

As my hon. Friend says, one of the problems on which we need to focus is depression among young people. Young people oppose the idea of taking anti-depressants. Will my hon. Friend say something about the importance of mindfulness in enabling them to build up their self-awareness, their self-confidence and their ability throughout their lives to handle possible recurring depression?

[Chris Ruane]

I know that the incidence of suicides among young people is a particular issue in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and mindfulness has a role to play in that context.

Many Members have mentioned compassion today. Mindfulness can help to give compassion to the individual and also to the health care worker. If compassion is lacking, mindfulness can enhance it. It can be used within the health care system, and has been taken up by doctors who are then in a better position to relate to their patients. Earlier this year there was a mindfulness session in the House of Commons for Members of this House and the House of Lords, and another will begin on 4 June.

Mindfulness can help in a personal capacity, but it can also assist the development of policy in prisons—85% of prisoners have mental health conditions—in education, in the armed forces, in the police and fire services, and in any area where there is trauma. It can play a big role throughout society and in all departments. I urge the Department of Health to recognise that, to act on NICE’s 2004 recommendations, and to ensure that the use of mindfulness for the treatment of repeat-episode depression is fully implemented. I also urge the Department to consider carefully its possible use in other parts of the national health service.

Welsh Affairs

Debate between Chris Ruane and Madeleine Moon

Thursday 1st March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I wish to talk in praise of the Bangor mindfulness centre in north Wales and the work that it does in my constituency with children and in helping people in work and to get people into work. The mindfulness centre is one of the top mindfulness research centres in the UK. For those who do not know what mindfulness is, I will explain that it is based on ancient practices but in a modern setting, and covers breathing and meditation techniques that are of known clinical excellence and which have been recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for recurring depression.

That is only the tip of the iceberg. It has benefits in all aspects of life, as has been realised in America, where mindfulness techniques are used in fire and police departments, to help reduce post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans returning from Iraq, in the education and health services, and even in Congress. However, they are underused in this country, and in my view Bangor university could make a big contribution, along with other universities—Oxford university is probably the leading centre in the UK and one of the leading centres in the world. The application of mindfulness has many positive effects. People who are more mindful are less likely to experience psychological distress, including depression and anxiety, and NICE has recommended it in favour of drug therapies for recurring depression.

[Mrs Moon]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the risks we will face if we do not use therapies such as the one he is describing so excellently is a cohort effect, leaving young people of this generation with a sense of failure and hopelessness and with poor self-image and self-worth?

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely, and my next point leads directly to that. People who are more mindful have higher and more stable self-esteem that is less dependent on external factors, which is important in this day and age. Young people feel pressure from their peers, the media and, most significantly, advertising. They are told that if they do not have a particular type of trainers or shirt they are less than normal. There is a lot of pressure out there, and mindfulness is known to help young people rediscover the important things in life.

People who are more mindful enjoy more satisfying relationships, are better at communicating and less troubled by relationship conflict. Mindfulness is correlated with emotional intelligence. Being more mindful is linked to higher success in reaching academic and personal goals. If we aim to raise educational standards, this could be a good way of doing it—a point I will move on to in greater detail in a moment.

Practising meditation has repeatedly been shown to improve people’s attention. It can be used instead of drugs such as Ritalin to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. More generally, it has been shown to increase blood flow, reduce blood pressure and protect people from cardiovascular disease. People who use mindfulness and meditation are half as likely to see their GP as those who do not. Let us just imagine the benefits for the health service of cutting GP visits by 50%. These are all excellent initiatives.

To show the relevance of mindfulness, I will give some key statistics. Between 12% and 15% of children on any one day will declare themselves to be unhappy, and 29% of them were living in poverty at the height of the Tory regime. That figure was reduced to 20%. Around 10% of five-year-olds are obese, and the figure rises to 20% for 10-year-olds. Around 20% of children will experience mental illness during childhood, and the figure rises to 45% for looked-after children and 72% for children in institutional care. Mindfulness could play a great role in helping to reduce that.

Mindfulness can also be used in the workplace. I recommend to Members the book, “The Mindful Workplace”, by Michael Chaskalson. It contains recommended and proven therapies which have helped to stabilise people in work and have been used by the Rhyl city strategy. We have had training days in north Wales attended by 120 businesses, because they could see the relevance of mindfulness to them. They can spot the patterns in their workplace when a worker is off for one day a week, then two days, and then three days—and after six months they might be off for a lifetime. Mindfulness-based workplace techniques can be used to stabilise people in the workplace. Indeed, there will be another event this April, which I will attend, based on the work in that book.