NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans

Debate between Diane Abbott and Norman Lamb

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

That is the reason for the secrecy thus far. The Government know that if the public understood what STPs meant, there would be an outcry.

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that unless the local community are fully engaged in the process of considering how the health and care system needs to change their area, the process is destined to fail and simply will not work?

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. For nearly the whole time I have been in Parliament, there have been attempts to reconfigure hospitals and close A&Es and make other changes in London. We have found that when the local community does not take ownership of the plans, it is impossible to take them forward. That secrecy runs counter to making the reorganisations we might have to make.

Psychosis: Early Intervention

Debate between Diane Abbott and Norman Lamb

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Ms Abbott]

It is true of many communities, and in particular the black and minority ethnic community, as the statistics prove, that they are reluctant to take family members into the national health system. When they finally have to engage with the national health service, their symptoms are much worse and it is far harder to get positive outcomes. I tell the Minister that it is really important to look at this issue of black and minority ethnic people and the mental health system, because it is causing real misery and problems within the community. We are less likely to be offered talking therapies and more likely to be offered electroconvulsive therapy. Again, mental health facilities within the prison service, such as Rampton, have disproportionate levels of black and minority ethnic persons inside those institutions.

[Norman Lamb]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way. She is making an incredibly important point about the over-representation of black and minority ethnic people in the system. Does she agree that they are also more likely to be subject to coercion—to sectioning under the Mental Health Acts—and more likely to suffer restraint and physical force within mental health settings?

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that important point. It is absolutely true that, partly because they are presenting late and often have quite advanced psychotic symptoms, they are more likely to experience coercion and restraint. We know that some of those incidents of restraint have had very unhappy outcomes, and families continue to campaign against the misuse of restraint on mental health patients. All these decades after people first started to look at issues relating to black and minority ethnic communities and the mental health service, we have made little progress. Is the Minister willing to meet me to discuss this issue, which I have looked at for many years? One of the basic problems is statistics. It took years to get the health service to keep statistics broken down by ethnicity within the mental health service, and I am not sure what is happening to those data.

As we have heard, it is vital that psychosis is treated early as that prevents complications, improves outcomes and is more cost-effective. We know that psychosis costs £11.8 billion a year and we also know that mental health problems are on the rise. It is very disturbing to find that the research shows that a quarter of CCGs seem to be ignoring the access waiting time standard for psychosis, and the National Audit Office reports that there are insufficient funds available for the strategy to achieve parity of esteem to have any reality. We know, because we have heard, that too many CCGs cannot even specify how much money is devoted to early intervention; that gives rise to the suspicion that not enough is devoted to it.

The right hon. Member for North Norfolk made the fundamental point that this issue is still not being treated with the same seriousness as cancer standards are. This goes back to the issue that many Members have raised of stigma, shame and an unwillingness of the families of psychosis sufferers to speak out in the way that the families of people who suffer from cancer are willing to go into the public space and to the media to speak out.