Oral Answers to Questions Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateGillian Keegan
Main Page: Gillian Keegan (Conservative - Chichester)Department Debates - View all Gillian Keegan's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberResearchers can apply right now to the National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation to access the £50 million of funding. The timescale for spending the money depends on the research applications received. The £50 million over five years is a minimum commitment, and we hope to spend much more than that on research in this vital area. We are working with the motor neurone community to help it effectively access the committed funding and to boost MND research even further.
The Minister has made a positive announcement in the course of the last few months, and this is an important repetition, but there seems to be a slight miscommunication going on because organisations are telling me that they are not sure where the co-ordination is coming from. May I invite her to meet me and the coalition of patients and researchers to try to nail down exactly what is happening, in a spirit of good faith?
I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend. I have also met some of the campaigners and researchers in this area, and the head of our research arm, so that we are clear. The support we are providing to the community includes a new £4 million MND partnership. That will bring the research community together so that they can pool resources and expertise to leverage that funding further, and ensure that they put forward strategic applications.
Benzodiazepines are an important medicine in the treatment of severe cases of certain types of epileptic conditions in children. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency continues to monitor the safety of treatment with benzodiazepines. Opioids are not authorised to treat children for acute forms of epilepsy.
Benzodiazepines are not appropriate for all children, and the Secretary of State has been instrumental in approving medicinal cannabis for use by children with epilepsy. I recently visited a medicinal cannabis farm in the borders of Scotland, which is poised to make an important contribution to the pharmaceutical industry in this country. Given the economic benefits, and the moral imperative of helping those children who can only benefit from medicinal cannabis, will the Minister say what steps the Government will take to make it available on NHS prescriptions?
The National Institute for Health Research welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health, including epilepsy, and we would welcome those pharmaceutical companies coming forward to partake in trials. The NIHR and the NHS will support a programme of two randomised control trials into epilepsy, which will compare medicines containing cannabidiol, and CBD plus tetrahydrocannabinol and a placebo. This is a pioneering area of research, and I am aware that NHS England and NIHR are working closely to get those trials started as soon as possible.
NHS England and NHS Improvement have been field testing waiting time standards across 35 different local pilot initiatives. Through that clinically led review, we hope to understand the merits of introducing them. NHS England and NHS Improvement published the outcome of a consultation on those standards on 22 February, just over a week ago. We will work with them now on the next steps for the proposed measures.
I am very interested in what the Minister says, and I would be really interested to see the review, but in Rotherham the waiting time for children’s neurodevelopmental assessments is 200 weeks. That is almost four years of a young life. Consultant led NHS services are required to report waiting times against the 18 and 52 week standard, but neurodevelopmental assessments having no such requirements means that the political will is not there to challenge. Will the Minister please look into putting the resources necessary into children’s mental health so that no child, wherever they are, goes without that support?
I thank the hon. Lady for her question. She raises an incredibly important point. As a Government, we are determined to tackle long autism diagnosis waiting times. We are investing £2.5 million as part of the NHS long-term plan to test and implement the most effective ways to reduce autism diagnosis waiting times for children and young people across England. That is vital, because we know that the earlier children get the support, the better the outcomes are for them. We are absolutely determined to work on this, but the diagnosis pathways are sometimes quite complex.
We want to ensure that more children and young people can access appropriate support in their community, and that those who require in-patient cases are treated as close to home as possible. The East Midlands Provider Collaborative is responsible for commissioning tasks for tier 4 in-patient children and adolescent mental health services, including for Derbyshire. It has implemented strategies to ensure the most efficient use of in-patient beds, including a review of the types of beds required by east midlands patients.
My constituent Stephen Jones wants what the Minister wants, but when his daughter required in-patient child mental health facilities she was forced to go to Stoke to receive them. He had a 70-mile journey every time he wanted to see her, which was obviously very expensive and also just impossible to do. It meant that his daughter’s mental health got worse, because she felt that she had been abandoned by her own family, putting the whole family under pressure. In addition, if people do not receive universal credit, they get no support with the financial impact. Will the Minister tell us more about how we can ensure that children’s mental health is not exacerbated by the inability to access services locally?
The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. Clearly, these are distressing enough times without having that commute and those travel arrangements on top of that, but sometimes the services are highly specialised. We are trying to get the right blend between access to highly specialised in-patient services and making sure that we increase community efforts. We have been working very hard to ensure that there are more community efforts, but we have also invested £10 million more in capital for more beds to make sure people can get treatment closer to home.
We have introduced significant changes to support for young carers, with statutory entitlements to young carers’ assessments from April 2015. Local authorities are held to account for such assessments and support through the social care inspection framework. Further, as we set out in our adult social care White Paper, we will amend the school census at the earliest opportunity to include young carers, allowing us to establish a wealth of evidence on this cohort.
I welcome more information being found out about young carers, because this is a hidden health crisis. A constituent came to see me. She is a young person now and has been a young carer for many years. The impact on her educational attainment, physical health and mental health has been devastating. There are 800,000 young carers in the UK, with 800 of them in Wandsworth where support services have been slashed. Does the Minister recognise the impact of that unpaid child labour and does she have a plan to tackle it?
Very much so. Young people should be protected from inappropriate and excessive caring responsibility, and adult and children’s services need to work together better. We recognise, though, the lack of hard data and evidence on outcomes for young carers. That is where we are and that is why we have made the commitment, with the Department for Education, to amend the school census. We intend to introduce that as early as 2022-23 and each year thereafter. The data will be collected at primary school and secondary school, so we will be able to look at all kinds of outcomes for this particular cohort and take actions.
On the issue of children’s mental health, does the Minister agree that children with ADHD and autism have found the last two years even more stressful than usual? A cross-departmental approach is long overdue to ensure that their needs are adequately met.
The hon. Lady is absolutely right, which is why we are working cross-departmentally to bring forward a mental health strategy. It is also why we have put in place mental health recovery funding specifically for the recovery from the pandemic, which has had a terrible effect on children’s mental health.
The Secretary of State is on record saying:
“Making medicinal cannabis available on prescription will benefit the lives of ill patients currently suffering in silence. There is nothing harder than seeing your loved ones in pain”.
Since he said that, there have been three prescriptions for medical cannabis on the NHS. They are important, because they set a legal and medical precedent that it can happen, and it can happen now. Currently, however, if I can afford it, I can buy it, but if I cannot, I cannot. When will he address that anomaly?