Health and Social Care

David Tredinnick Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

In challenging circumstances, the NHS is performing extremely well. Front-line staff are making heroic efforts to control costs as they cope with the pressures of an ageing population and when 1 million more people are using A and E every year than at the time of the last election.

The Opposition run down NHS performance, but the reality is a service delivering more than it ever did on their watch: 400,000 more operations every year than under Labour; the number of people waiting more than a year for an operation down from over 18,000 in May 2010, to just 665 at the end of February; MRSA infections halved; mixed-sex accommodation nearly abolished; dementia diagnosis rates going up; and more than 28,000 people receiving life-saving drugs from the cancer drugs fund that Labour refused to set up. As we debate health, care and support today, I take the opportunity to commend and thank all the dedicated professionals who work extraordinary hours, day in, day out, for their part in making this happen.

If we are to prepare for the future, however, we need to do more. In our generation, the number of over-85s will double, the number of people with dementia will pass the 1 million mark, and 3 million people will have not one, not two, but three chronic conditions to cope with, on top of the other pressures of old age. We must be there for each and every one of them—the founding values of the NHS would accept nothing less—and to do so we must be able to answer three big questions: how can we be certain that people receive compassionate care even when they are not able to speak for themselves; how can we deliver joined-up care to people who use the NHS and social care system on a regular basis; and how can we ensure that sustainable funding is in place for care and support?

[David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will be aware of widespread concern among the herbal medical community that there is no statutory regulation on that area in the Care Bill. Does he agree that if polymorbidity is to be dealt with we must have firm regulation, and that just licensing herbs, as the European Union wants, would destroy the industry?

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend follows such matters extremely closely and I reassure him that the Government will update the House on that issue very soon.

The Care Bill will take a critical step forward in addressing each of the big questions that I raised, so let us consider how. First is compassionate care. Labour’s target culture led to warped priorities in our NHS and appalling human tragedy. No one disputes the value of targets, and the four-hour target played an important role in improving A and E departments. We do not, however, need targets at any cost, as we saw at Stoke Mandeville, Maidstone and Mid Staffs.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane). I entirely agree with what he said about mindfulness and the need for NICE to ensure that it is available for the treatment of stress in particular. That is all the more important now that we have a Government who have put patient choice at the heart of the health service, a fact that will become more and more evident as health and wellbeing boards and Healthwatch start to make an impression through the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I intend to focus exclusively on health issues. I shall concentrate not on what is in the Queen’s Speech but on what is missing from it, particularly the expected statutory regulation of herbal therapies. If we are to ensure that the range of treatments that people demand, including mindfulness, are safely regulated in the health service, we must tackle the issue of herbal medicine, which is a crucial tool in our cupboard.

At this point, I must declare an interest. I was involved in the legislation applying to the last two groups that were made subject to statutory regulation, the Osteopaths Act 1993 and the Chiropractors Act 1994, as a member of the Standing Committees that considered those Bills. Let me emphasise to Ministers how important it is to take that route. It makes practitioners focus on a disciplined structure and operate a robust complaints procedure, it makes it easier for doctors to refer, and it makes treatments more widely available.

When it comes to herbs, we need an interface with European legislation. We must deal with regulation 3(6) of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, which grants “a person”, not a therapist, the right to practise. What worries me is that Ministers may regulate not therapists but specific herbs. There are thousands of them out there, and that cannot be satisfactory. We must give therapists the right to prescribe. In the case of traditional Chinese medicine, for example, most practitioners will prescribe three herbs to work in conjunction. As I have said in the House before, it works like the Whips Office: there is a chief, a deputy and a messenger. The messenger takes the chief and the deputy to cure the problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge) laughs; of course, that does not always apply to Whips.

My greatest worry is this: I believe that the statutory regulation has been blocked by vested interests in the orthodox medical community who have said to the Secretary of State “We do not want this, because it will enhance the status of herbal therapists.” If that is true, it is selfish and stupid.

A sub-set of the problems lies in the fact that there are two types of herbal therapies. There is the phyto therapy provided by Hydes Herbal Clinic in Leicester, which I believe is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), and there is traditional Chinese medicine, which involves the use of different types of herb. We need separate registers to make sure that these therapies are prescribed safely.

It is interesting to see the headlines that are appearing now. The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd talked about doctors using mindfulness. One headline states, “GPs prefer herbal remedies to Prozac, says survey”, and one such cited remedy is St John’s wort, which in fact has side-effects if used with other, conventional, medicines. One reason why I want statutory legislation is to make sure that people who are taking herbal medicines can go to their doctors and say, “Yes, I am taking it, and doing so under the prescription of a statutorily regulated practitioner.”

I should say in passing that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), who has been dealing with this issue, has graciously offered me a meeting to discuss it further, and I look forward to taking him up on that.

Provision was made in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 for the Professional Standards Authority, which should regulate all complementary therapies other than those provided by individual practitioners, who are regulated under individual legislation. The Society of Homeopaths, which I have supported for years, should be regulated too. Here, we are completely out of line not just with Europe but with Asia and America. We have not used enough of such resources. It is patently absurd to say it is all placebo, given that in Europe 40,000 physicians practise homeopathy, in Asia, 250,000 physicians practise it, and it is practised in Brazil, Nigeria and America. It is not a placebo, because people are using it. One can fool some of the people all of the time and vice versa, but not all the people all of the time.

The other reason why those who oppose such therapies make some headway is they refer only to homeopaphy randomised control trials. Sixty-four of 156 have been positive, and only 11 negative. We should also consider meta-analyses and patient-reported outcomes. Where double-blind placebo-controlled trials are conducted, they are ignored.

Just a few centuries ago, scientists were saying that the sun went round the earth; now, we know that the earth goes round the sun. Science changes. Here, we should bear in mind what is known as the Semmelweis reflex. When a doctor in Germany discovered that child mortality rates could be reduced if doctors washed their hands, conventional practitioners pooh-poohed the idea, but eventually it became the norm. We have to be progressive, and so it is with some homeopathic remedies, which are so dilute that they cannot be seen through conventional analysis. However, the fact is that those very dilute substances work effectively. The future lies in a wider range of health provision across the health service.

I want to finish with an e-mail I received today:

“Dear David,

From browsing the web I hear you are cynically referred to as the honourable member for Holland and Barrett.”

Yes, a Labour Minister many years ago called me that. The e-mail continues:

“If those who jeer had survived a life debilitating illness like Parkinson’s for twenty years, I would have more time for them.

I have done this while trying to escape the unsolicited attentions of a family populated with several consultants and even more GPs… Alternative therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture, herbs and now helminths are the reason I am alive today.”