Covid-19: Vaccinations
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
We are way over time, so I am going to take only four more questions and I would be grateful if they could be swift.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con) [V]
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the progress made so far, but ask him for some reassurance about those whose appointments have been cancelled due to the vaccine unexpectedly not being available. Will he confirm that they will not be forgotten about, that they will not lose their place in the queue and that they will be reached swiftly?
Nadhim Zahawi
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. I can give him the reassurance that anyone who has had their appointment cancelled will get that appointment reinstated and will get their vaccine. Our absolute commitment is to make sure that those four most vulnerable cohorts have the offer of a vaccine by the middle of February.
Covid-19 Update
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
I am delighted that we have a significant increase in the number of NHS staff. The figures published this morning show that there are 14,800 more nurses than there were this time last year in the NHS. I am really pleased about that. The right hon. Lady will no doubt have seen yesterday that the pause on pay increases across the public sector announced by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor does not apply to nurses and doctors. That is, in part, in recognition of the incredible work that they have done during this pandemic.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
As the economic damage the pandemic is doing becomes increasingly apparent, it is clearly right that businesses of all types are reopened as soon as it is safe to do so. This will take longer than it needs to if the restrictions on those businesses are calculated on the basis of virus information for places a long way away or as a geographical average for a wide area encompassing urban and rural parts. That is exactly what is going to happen to the businesses in my constituency, which will not be able to open next week if they are hospitality businesses, not because of the rates where they are, but because of the rates somewhere else. Surely it is more sensible to calculate restrictions on the smallest geographical area where data is reliable, which is largely boroughs and districts. Will my right hon. Friend commit in his review in two weeks’ time to look not just at whether individual areas are in the right tier but at whether the areas are properly constructed?
Matt Hancock
Yes, absolutely. My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right about the importance of this. We have to balance the need for an area to reflect the human geography in which people live and effectively communicate the tiering decisions across that geography, with precisely the concerns that he mentions. For instance, Slough is in tier 3, despite the fact that Berkshire, of which it is a part, is in tier 2, so we are prepared to take those decisions at a lower-tier local authority area level. That is the exception rather than the norm, but we look at this every single week.
Covid-19 Update and Hospitality Curfew
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
It is constantly under review. We have shown that we are willing to change the measures to follow what works. This is an unprecedented crisis. I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for the measures across West Yorkshire. It has been a pleasure to work with him and to hear his voice in this Chamber on what is needed. My message to his constituents in Huddersfield and those across West Yorkshire is that these measures are necessary—we would not have them in place unless they were—and the more that people can abide by them, the quicker we will be able to lift them. I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman on supporting people in Huddersfield and those throughout the country to keep this situation under control.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
I recognise, of course, the value of simplicity on issues such as the curfew for the hospitality industry, but will my right hon. Friend accept that we should allow economic activity where it does not cut across public health objectives? Will he therefore apply an imaginative approach to doing that—for example, looking at how we might be able to allow hotel guests to stay in hotel bars where they are resident in the hotel later than 10 o’clock, recognising that some hotels depend substantially on that income?
Matt Hancock
I am always happy to look at, as my right hon. and learned Friend calls them, imaginative ideas like that. He will know that there is a tension between the clarity of the rules and bringing additional nuances into the rules. He will have seen how, as a society, we have struggled with that balance all the way through this, because we are in novel circumstances. I am happy to talk to him about his proposal.
Covid-19 Response
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
The hon. Lady is absolutely right; this is an incredibly important subject, both, as she says, during the crisis and thereafter. We have a study under way, which Public Health England is conducting, on the impact of all sorts of different conditions on the likelihood that covid-19 will hit someone hard. It is true that there is a link to levels of deprivation, in the same way as one of the strongest factors, other than age, is obesity—that needs to be investigated. We have also seen a bigger impact on people from minority ethnic backgrounds. All these things need to be studied. Levelling up and closing that health inequality gap is an incredibly important part of the Government’s agenda for recovering from this terrible disease.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con) [V]
As my right hon. Friend has said, due to the hard work of the entire health and social care system we can now look beyond this crisis. As we do that, may I ask him to say more today, and in the coming days, about how we intend to balance the need to address a substantial backlog of more routine and elective work, which, as he says, has been understandably pushed aside by covid-19, with the need to make sure that NHS staff, who have been through an extremely stressful period, have the time to recover?
Matt Hancock
That is one of the many balances we will have to strike in the months and years to come as we recover from covid-19. There are, immediately, three things we are doing on that. The first is that we have brought in more staff, especially retired staff, and we want to keep them. They have been absolutely brilliant and a huge help to the NHS during the crisis. The second is providing more support to staff. I mentioned the mental health support, but this involves all sorts of other, wider support to staff right across health and social care. The third thing is making sure that we rebuild the NHS, gaining from the improvements that have been made in the eye of this storm, because there have been improvements to ways of working. Huge strides forward have been taken on the use of technology, and we have found areas where that has made a very big positive impact. Although there are, of course, parts of this crisis response that we want to roll back, there are other parts we want to pick up and take forward.
Paterson Inquiry
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Ms Dorries
The hon. Lady raises a wide range of issues, which I will try to go through. First, I reassure her that, at the time Paterson was practising, the CQC was not investigating or assessing the private sector; that was introduced in 2015. Whistleblowing was in an entirely different place from where it is now. We now have 500 lanyard-wearing national guardians across the NHS, and we encourage people to raise their concerns with those national guardians, the guardians to listen and the trust to act quickly on the concerns raised. I think it is fair to say, that since 2012, when the CQC introduced revalidation, a number of regulatory processes have been put in place. There was shockingly little at the time that Paterson was practising. The system is now much more robust—and yet, I completely take her point; much more still needs to be done.
We are learning the lessons from Getting it Right First Time. In fact, that is a subject of discussion within the Department. We are looking at how the lessons have been applied and what we can learn.
The hon. Lady is right about revalidation and 365° appraisal every five years. As she will know, the CQC is an independent body. It introduced revalidation and appraisal. Our job is now to ask the CQC to make that system more robust and look at how to improve it, because that is an important part of the equation, ensuring that something like this does not happen again. I say here and now at the Dispatch Box that I would like the CQC, as a matter of urgency, to look at how it can make that system more robust and effective, so that we can quickly identify doctors—not those like the hon. Lady—who are not up to standard, who are outliers and who should not be practising.
We will look at the hon. Lady’s point about the HSSIB. I do not think that there is a role for the HSSIB in the private sector. The private sector is a matter of personal choice. It is our job to ensure that healthcare reaches the same standard across the board, whether it is in the private sector or the NHS. The CQC does that, and that is how we hold the private sector to account. Then it is down to patients to make the choice about where they wish to be treated; that is their independent choice. That is a matter of consent, which is something else we need to look at—how do conversations about consent take place? Does the patient have the capacity to take in the information being given to them? Are they making an informed choice? Do they have enough information about the surgeon they are seeing to make the right choice? Those are the issues we need to focus on.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
If patients are to be kept safe, several things need to be true. First, as the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) said, medical professionals who have concerns about the practice of other medical professionals need to have their concerns properly listened to. Is it not therefore a matter of serious concern that four of the six whistleblowers in this case—one of whom I have the privilege to represent in this place—found themselves subject to fitness-to-practise reviews after reporting their concerns?
Secondly, is it not right that medical organisations—public or private—need to act on those concerns? It is profoundly troubling that concerns were reported to the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust in 2003, but it did not suspend Paterson until 2011.
Thirdly, is it not important that regulators do what they need to do? It is also profoundly troubling that concerns about Paterson’s malpractice were reported to the GMC in 2007, and his suspension by the GMC came only in 2012.
Ms Dorries
I would like to make an apology. I mentioned the CQC in response to the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford)—the acronyms!—but it was the GMC.
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. I reiterate that Paterson is in jail, and that the processes now in the regulatory framework did not exist at the time Paterson was practising. The culture towards whistleblowers is very different now from what it was then, as demonstrated by the roll-out of the national guardians scheme. The national guardians are there for whistleblowers to go to. We want—we absolutely want—people to report when they think somebody is acting inappropriately, or a surgeon or doctor is not practising to the standards they should be. We want to know that as soon as possible. There will be no investigations of whistleblowers’ fitness to practise; that will apply to the people they are reporting. I do not think the national guardians scheme has had enough press or that people are aware enough of it. It is about speaking up, listening and then the trust acting on the information it has. One of the outcomes of this report will be that we can reassure both healthcare professionals and the public that we want them to speak up. We actually want them to be a whistleblower because only by doing that can we guarantee patient safety.
Health Infrastructure Plan
Jeremy Wright Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Edward Argar
The hon. Lady, as she says, comes to this with a wealth of experience. The bids were put forward by individual trusts working with their STPs, and in the context of the STPs that have been developed. There is a synthesis and a read across to ensure that, in this announcement, we have picked the trusts that put together the most compelling bids in order to deliver value for money and improvements where they are needed.
Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
I welcome my hon. Friend to his new post and, of course, I welcome the investment he has announced, but he will recognise that, however new the hospital, being an in-patient can be a profoundly distressing experience for someone with dementia. Good design can help tremendously, so will he do all he can to ensure that the best possible design standards are used when building these hospitals, with the interests of people with dementia in mind?
Edward Argar
My right hon. and learned Friend makes an important point that is close to my heart, as a former co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dementia. I recently, or relatively recently, had the opportunity to visit Leicester Royal Infirmary, which has done exactly that and worked with the Alzheimer’s Society and others to create a dementia-friendly ward. He is right that that sort of thing should be hardwired into our designs as we upgrade hospitals.