A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)]

Let me start by thanking the NHS and care staff who looked after my constituents in South West Surrey so magnificently in the last year. Every resident of Farnham, Godalming and Haslemere is in their debt and incredibly grateful. As this is Dementia Action Week, I also particularly thank those who looked after people living with dementia, whether care home staff, home visitors or family members.

It is to the quality and safety of NHS care in normal times, as well as during pandemics, that I shall address my comments this afternoon. I will never forget the first members of the public who came to see me when I was Health Secretary to talk about issues of quality and safety. They were a young couple from Devon called Scott and Sue Morrish, who lost their three-year-old son Sam to sepsis. An independent inquiry ultimately decided, in two investigations, that every single NHS organisation that they had dealt with—the GP surgery, the out-of-hours service, NHS Direct, as was, and the hospital—had failed Sam in his care.

Scott and Sue are a modest couple—the last people to kick up a fuss—but they said that when they asked politely for a meeting to discuss Sam’s care a few months after his death, the shutters came down and no one was prepared to talk to them; it was like talking to a brick wall. Ultimately, it took them six years to uncover the truth of what happened to Sam. We should never, ever put a grieving family through that kind of agony.

That is why I focused on safety and quality. It is why I introduced Ofsted-style ratings for hospitals, care homes and GP surgeries, which I think have had some success. Indeed, I am happy to say that they have had particular success at the hospital where Sam was treated, where there has been a big change in culture. However, that is the reason why, with these new reforms, it is absolutely essential that safety and quality is at the heart of what we ask from the new integrated care systems. It is vital that they are outward-looking to the needs of patients and not upward-looking to the requirements of NHS bureaucracy. I am delighted that the Secretary of State wrote to me yesterday confirming that safety and quality would be one of the core requirements being asked of the new integrated care systems. On that basis, I will support the reforms and the Bill, as, I believe, will the Health and Social Care Committee, based on the report that we published last week.

However, there were two omissions from the White Paper that I do need to mention. The first—social care—has been mentioned this afternoon, and I know that the Secretary of State will say that reforms are on the way. I just want to say to him, as the only person here this afternoon who has done his job, that I had four winter crises in a row because we tried to fix the problems of the NHS without trying to fix the problems of the social care system at the same time. If we fix one system and not the other, the social care system will continue to export its most vulnerable patients into hospitals, where they are much more expensive to treat and it is much worse for them, particularly people with dementia. I know that money is a big issue—this is a very expensive thing—but if the NHS really is a priority for this Government, the social care system has to be as well, and I urge him Godspeed and all strength in the battles ahead to secure the reforms for social care that are so urgently needed.

The second omission is around workforce reform. We have a NHS where there are gaps in nearly every medical specialty, as well as in nursing. I was proud to set up five new medical schools and that had a big increase in the number of doctors, nurses and midwives we trained, but even with 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 additional doctors, we need a major overhaul of workforce planning. The obvious reform is to give Health Education England the statutory duty to publish annually long-term workforce requirements to act as a kind of Office for Budget Responsibility-style discipline on the Government to train enough doctors and nurses. I hope that the Secretary of State will consider that.

In conclusion, integration of care—offering joined-up care to patients—is a vital objective, but without enough doctors and nurses to do it, and without a social care system that is able to integrate with the NHS, the worthy objectives that we all have for these reforms will not meet the aspirations that people on both sides of the House rightly have.