Health: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am concerned to hear the noble Baroness’s comments because I know that an enormous amount of good work is going on around the country. There are programmes to encourage clinical leadership, improvement projects designed to integrate services, a commissioning toolkit, benchmarking data on outcomes and tools to aid local campaigns. If the services designed to help COPD patients are being diluted in any way, I should be very concerned about that and interested to hear the details.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, does the Minister recall the recent paper from the Royal College of Psychiatrists that highlights that mental disorder is behind a large number of people taking up smoking and drinking? Will he consider whether this is not an argument for further investment in child and adolescent mental health services, so that children and young people suffering from anxiety and depression receive the help that they need at an early stage and do not reach for alcohol, tobacco and other substances that can have these awful outcomes in later life?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl on linking mental health with COPD in that neat way. He is absolutely right that smoking is an activity that puts one at high risk of COPD and that smoking is closely associated with poor mental health. Fifty per cent of the tobacco smoked in this country is smoked by those with mental health problems. We are determined to continue efforts to discourage smoking in the general population. We are also keen to raise awareness of good lung health generally, which brings us back to the Question on the Order Paper. To a large extent, such efforts will fall to the new public health service in future.