Autism
Danielle Rowley Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Mrs Trevelyan
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I want to discuss waiting times for diagnosis, which are getting better. In the case of my son James, we could not get any kind of diagnosis within the NHS and had to go private. There is not yet the capacity within local areas to ensure that when there is something different with a child early on, there is somewhere to go. I contend the use of language by the hon. Member for Huddersfield—it is not that there is something not right, but that there is something different, and that use of language is important. I say that as someone who has shouted at a lot of people when my son has had a meltdown and said, “If you don’t understand what’s going on, could you kindly go away and keep your opinions to yourself?” That is not normally how I phrase it when I am in a supermarket.
I want to throw something into the mix. As we move forward with so much more work going on across Departments, we might look at having a regional centre of excellence on diagnostics for children on the spectrum, so that we can ensure that wherever we are—whether in the north-east, the south-west, the north-west or Scotland—we know as MPs that we can direct people to a centre of excellence that will be able to help to identify children’s particular needs and so that we never get into the question whether this is about mental health.
Autism is a permanent, different way of being, whether for profoundly autistic children, for whom a great deal of support is required, or those at the high-functioning end of the spectrum—the Asperger’s part—who can be incredibly successful. Some of our greatest inventors and businesspeople are in that space, but if people cannot make it through the basic education system because their needs are not met early on and they fall out of it, that will not happen. Early diagnosis is so important, and I ask the Minister to think about that.
Mrs Trevelyan
Only if it is a brief intervention, otherwise I will get told off again.
Danielle Rowley
That is very generous. Does the hon. Lady agree that early diagnosis has a huge impact on families? I have a constituent who was told that her son had autism at the age of 18 months but did not secure a diagnosis until he was five years old. That had a huge impact.
Mrs Trevelyan
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Not every council needs a child psychologist who is an expert in the identification of autism, but it would be great if there were one or two across the north-east, in my region, whom we knew we could always tap into. There have not been for years. The situation is getting better, but it is not good enough. We need to think more intelligently about how we provide that resource for families.
I want to talk in more detail about interventions. It is so exciting that the teacher training module will come into the system from September. Before I talk about that, I want to read from a letter sent to me by one of my constituents, a lady called Skye. I have not met her; I have knocked on her door, but there has never been anyone in. She wrote to me about her son, who is four years old and has complex needs. He attends our special school in Berwick. She says:
“Every day so many simple things in life that we all take for granted become a moment of stress, worry and concern”.
She says that could give a vast list of examples of the stresses her child undergoes every day. My heart goes out to her; I was there some 15 years ago, too. She highlights one particular issue:
“Shopping trolleys with child seats are designed for toddlers. My little/big man squeezes into this trolley with pain and distress. I have to lift him above my head because I am only a 5ft mummy.”
Those are the sort of practical things that day-to-day life can throw at mums who are having to deal with this. She goes on to say that
“many younger autism sufferers…have no boundaries, no understanding of the consequence of their actions, and if they have a crisis moment could injure themselves”
by falling out of the trolley or running away. I lost James once in a supermarket, and it was possibly the worst half-hour of my life. She says:
“Being confined to a safe space (trolley seat) is safer for them. It provides an object reference”,
as well as security, as a pram does for a much smaller child. That is a really interesting challenge to us, to think about how we might encourage the tools that can help a family in those public spaces where we go every week.
I almost never took James shopping until recently, as part of our plastics challenge, which I am sure the Minister will join us in. We went shopping and I said, “I’m not buying plastics.” He wanted a particular cheese that only came wrapped in plastic, so he had to buy it himself. There is a lesson for an 18-year-old boy who has never been shopping before: he gets taken shopping, and his mother then makes him do his own shopping.
The reality is that the tools to help people get over the crisis points are vital. I really hope that as the autism module rolls out, teachers are given those tools. James had an amazing teacher when he was six years old. He was not diagnosed, but she could see his meltdowns coming. She told me to bring a beanbag into school, which she put behind her desk. She said to James that whenever it all got too much for him—which was quite often, when somebody was prodding him, he was sitting in the wrong place or he could not see or hear—he was allowed to get up and leave his desk or wherever he was and go and sit in the beanbag behind the desk. The teacher knew where he was, because that is where he always went. The other children did not know or care; they carried on with their school activities. It gave him a safe place that was invisible to everybody else, but they knew he was safe, and then the moment passed.
This is a child who got three A-levels last year and is going to Newcastle to read zoology in September, but when he was seven or eight years old and undiagnosed, nobody thought he would be mainstreamed. He was mainstreamed because teachers thought about how they might give him the tools to get around those moments. We need the teacher training framework to think about the practicalities. These children are simply different, and we have to understand what not being neurotypical means. It is hard for those of us who are neurotypical to understand it.
We must give teachers the opportunity to ask questions. For many teachers in busy classrooms, if one or two children are struggling, the exclusion line is the one that is followed. The behavioural problem kicks in because the child is under a great deal of stress, entirely unnecessarily, and we find those children suffering huge long-term educational failure as a result of the teacher’s inability to intervene early on with something quite simple that can give the child time to recover.
Male Suicide
Danielle Rowley Excerpts(7 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jackie Doyle-Price)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I thank the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) for the powerful and moving way in which he addressed this important subject. He said that this is his first Westminster Hall debate; I am sure that it will be the first of many. I encourage him to continue to look at this subject, because it is clear from the passion with which he articulated his argument that he cares deeply about it. I will always welcome hearing any representations from him.
The hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out that suicide is the biggest killer of men between the ages of 25 and 49. Any death by suicide is an avoidable death. We should always be vigilant and do what we can to tackle suicide and self-harm. There is a gender difference because suicide affects men more and women tend to self-harm more, but the motivation is the same. We should look at the same tools in order to curb them.
Every death by suicide is a tragedy. As the Minister responsible for mental health, I hear from families bereaved by suicide about the devastating impact that it has on them and on the wider community. All of us in this House will have been touched by suicide in one way or another, whether directly and personally or through the experience of constituents. It feels like society has failed those people. That is why I am determined to drive forward the action we are taking at a national level and in local communities to reduce suicides. Generally, paying greater attention to mental health will make a great deal of difference, particularly on the issues that the hon. Gentleman raised: encouraging people to be willing to talk and encouraging everyone around them to know when somebody might need help.
Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)
As my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) said, the majority of people who have committed suicide never reached professional help or went to a health professional. Does the Minister agree that preventive training needs to be rolled out to people such as landlords, firemen and taxi drivers with whom people with suicidal feelings might have contact, even if they do not reach out?
Jackie Doyle-Price
In a nutshell, we all need to become much more aware about when people might show signs of mental ill health. I hope that through the programmes that we are running, the priority that we are putting on mental health will do much to raise awareness.
Obviously, we are trying to do much more in schools, following the publication of “Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper”, but the category of people that the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West referred to miss all that attention. Working-class men who work on building sites are not “meant” to have mental health problems, so when they have them, nobody pays any attention, because the environment is very masculine. The hon. Gentleman identified that. They are certainly not going to seek help, so it is not surprising that that particular group of people has a very high incidence of suicide. There is a general role for public awareness.
The point that the hon. Member for Midlothian (Danielle Rowley) made about bars is a very interesting one. We are keen to use mainstream media to highlight the message. One of the reasons that we support Time to Change, which the hon. Gentleman referred to, is exactly that—to get out those populist messages to raise awareness among the whole general public, so that we can all identify when someone is in trouble.
NHS Pay
Danielle Rowley Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
I start by acknowledging just how long the constraints on pay in the NHS and across the public sector more generally have applied, and I say that fully recognising that I was a member of the coalition Government. I understood and accepted the reason why constraint was necessary at that time, because public sector pay had run quite a long way ahead of private sector pay, but the situation is very different now. Ultimately, we cannot justify year-on-year real-terms pay cuts for workers in the public sector as a way of sustaining our vital public services, but that is what they are facing and we have to face up to it.
Alongside the moral case is the fact that the cap simply will not work. The Royal College of Nursing says that the NHS in England is some 40,000 nurses short, and that has consequences. Among the doctor workforce, rota gaps are endemic—I suspect the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) recognises that. It is particularly bad in some parts of the country and in some specialties. The hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) spoke about psychiatry. According to the survey published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists earlier this week, the numbers of psychiatrists vary significantly around the country, with some areas disturbingly short.
We often talk about doctors and nurses in this House, but so many other people work in the NHS. Allied health professionals, caretakers, orderlies and all sorts of other people are affected by the cap, many of whom are on very low pay. I want to give a particular shout-out to paramedics in the east of England, many of whom regularly work very long shifts and often get home utterly exhausted after dealing with traumatic events. I pay particular tribute to the 70 staff from the East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust who have signed up to become blue light champions to highlight the importance of mental health among that organisation’s workforce. That has been done with the support of Unison and the involvement of Mind, which does really important work with frontline workers.
When we talk about pay levels in the NHS, we should also think about pay levels in social care. Non-payment of the minimum wage is endemic in many parts of the social care system, which is intolerable. Too many workers who provide care in people’s homes are still not properly paid for travel time. Information I got from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs recently showed that millions of pounds of unpaid wages had been recovered following an exercise in social care. When we talk about the need for a fair deal for NHS workers, we also need to talk about a fair deal for people working in social care, who do often very unattractive but vital work.
Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned public sector workers more widely. In Scotland, despite voting not to scrap the cap in May, the Scottish National party Government have now listened and done so. However, public sector workers in UK bodies in my constituency and across Scotland are still left out, and will continue to be left out by the recent Tory announcement to lift the cap selectively. Will he join me in urging the Government to value and properly pay all public sector workers across the UK and ensure that none is left behind?
Norman Lamb
I agree that we have to treat people with justice across the public sector to ensure that they are not unfairly and unreasonably left behind.
On the comments made by the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), behind this issue is the inescapable question of the amount of money that we are putting into health and care services, because that ultimately determines how much we can pay and how many people we can employ. The bottom line is that we cannot carry on as we are; it is not sustainable. We are not being honest with the British people. The truth is that, at the last election, none of the political parties had a solution for the NHS and the care system. I was challenged earlier about the fact that the Lib Dems argued for a 1p increase in income tax. I absolutely acknowledge that that is not a panacea and would not solve all the problems, but it would provide an immediate £6 billion, which would have a big impact on the sustainability of the system.
The bottom line is that we need to work together across the party divide. If we do not, we will be letting down the people of this country. We can continue to shout at each other, but that does not help the family whose loved one is let down by failures of care because the NHS and the care system do not have sufficient resources. More than 1 million older people have care needs that are not being met because of the underfunding in social care. As the Independent Age UK survey showed, well over 80% of Members of Parliament, on both sides of the House, agree that we need to work together to come up with a long-term, sustainable solution. Please, Government, get on with it.