Department of Health and Social Care and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Helen Whately Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the thoughtful speech of the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts). I really enjoyed listening to it.

Everybody has an NHS story, whether a child born, a disease cured or a life saved. I have seen the NHS at its best—when my five-year-old son got appendicitis on Christmas day and three days later was home and happy, without his appendix. I have also seen it at its worst, however—when my fiercely independent grandmother tripped over and bruised herself. What followed included misdiagnosis, mis-medication, a morphine overdose, a six-month stay in hospital and enormous frustration trying to access social care. She returned home only to die. I suspect that my experiences reflect a national picture, of many, many lives saved against the odds and huge public support, rightly, for the NHS, but also of the tragedy of lives lost through omissions and errors.

I would like to take a step back in this the NHS’s 70th birthday year to say there is much to celebrate in our national health service: 44 million babies born, millions more treated, cancers cured, thousands of people alive who would not have been without its help, and long-term conditions such as diabetes much better managed, with much improved quality of life as well as life expectancy. Our health service is renowned around the world for providing the most equitable access to healthcare, and for this it is the envy of the world.

But we must not be misty-eyed about the NHS. Even on access, in my area of Kent there are some terrible A&E waits, while 1,500 children are waiting for mental health treatment, over 100 of them for more than a year. In some areas, NHS outcomes are not what they should or could be. There is still far to go to join up parts of the health and social care systems, as others have said this evening, and too little emphasis on public health and ever rising demand. I welcome the recently announced £20.5 billion of funding for the NHS, and also the forthcoming social care settlement, which is really important, because funding the NHS will not work if we do not also give social care the funding it needs.

The NHS has a huge opportunity to make the funding go further, and I do not mean through salami-slicing, penny-pinching and cost-cutting, through saving on biscuits and paper clips—I actually think a little more should be spent on enabling staff to eat together. I just want to touch on three areas of better spending. One is technology. There is a huge opportunity here. It has been said many times, but should be said again, that there is much further to go to improve the use of technology in the NHS, whether that is just updating systems so they work—so that doctors do not spend time cutting and pasting patients’ information or waiting for a system to turn on after it has turned itself off; having a fully functional single patient record that brings together mental and physical health, dental records and end-of-life instructions; or giving patients far more opportunity to use technology. In that regard, I welcome the recently announced app for booking appointments online. There are many other tools for better self-management. We must drive forward the potential for big data, artificial intelligence and personalised medicine, which could make such a difference to what we get from our NHS.

Secondly, on the workforce, it is fantastic that we are training and recruiting more doctors, including 100 more in a medical school in Kent, but with vacancy rates too high, particularly in mental health, and high staff turnover, we know that for parts of the workforce things are just not working. Junior doctors have told me they feel like cogs in a machine, and so too often do nurses, therapists, healthcare assistants, porters—you name it. So often I have heard them say things like, “Nobody ever listens”. In some parts of the health service, command and control has unfortunately dehumanised the experience of working in the NHS—a job that should be so full of satisfaction. The NHS has much to learn from itself, and from other systems and other sectors, about how to be a better place to work and to make the most of its fantastic workforce in order to provide the care we aspire to.

Thirdly, it is time to end the divide between physical and mental health. We need to give a greater share of the funding pie to mental health, as the Government have recognised, and knit together mental and physical health. When the two are joined together, it improves outcomes for patients and provides better value for the NHS—better outcomes at lower cost, which is exactly what we need and want.

We need to talk about the funding of the NHS and social care, as many Members have done so eloquently this evening. We need to talk about how much money is needed, and about the big question of where we are to find that money. Those are not difficult conversations, and they do not involve difficult decisions. However, we also need to talk about how to make the best use of the money, so that we can have the health and care system that we want for years to come.