The National Health Service

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the amazing speech from the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan). In the Queen’s Speech, the Government did not mention the long-awaited social care Green Paper or lay down any plans for how they would tackle the social care crisis. Instead, they simply said that they would

“bring forward proposals to reform adult social care in England to ensure dignity in old age”,

failing to mention working-age adults, people with mental illness and carers, who also rely on care. Everyone in this House knows that the current social care system is in crisis. It faces serious challenges as more people need care, but chronic underfunding means that fewer people receive it, and for those who need it, every day is a struggle.

Recently, the Care & Support Alliance conducted a survey of more than 3,000 people with social care needs. It found that one in five respondents went without meals due to lack of care and support; one in four struggled without basic support to do things such as get out of bed in the morning, get dressed or go to the toilet; and more than one in three felt lonely and isolated because of the lack of care and support.

Social care plays an important part in managing hospital admissions for people with mental illness. According to the independent review of the Mental Health Act 1983, around half of all delayed discharges from mental health wards are the result of difficulties in securing appropriate housing and care packages.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I wonder whether the hon. Lady is aware of the figures that I have received. Some 850,000 children and young people have a clinically significant mental health problem; one in 10 children between the ages of five and 16—three in every classroom—has a diagnosable mental health problem; and 75% of mental health trusts do not have enough in their budget to look after them. Does she agree that in his response the Minister should deal with the massive issue of children’s mental health? It needs to be addressed.

[Eleanor Smith]

I do agree with that. The Royal College of Psychiatrists would back up the hon. Gentleman as well.

Organisations such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists have said that the ambition in the long-term plan to reduce the length of stay in adult acute in-patient mental health settings cannot be achieved without improved social care.

It is important to acknowledge the role of carers in supporting people with social care needs. Their own mental health can be at stake due to the pressure, the lack of support and the lack of information. According to a report by Rethink Mental Illness, only one in four carers—23%—feels well informed and respected as a partner in care. A similar proportion, 24%, receive no carer’s assessment, despite it being mandated under the Care Act 2014.

When the social care of patients is not met, not only does their independence suffer; so too does their health, which has a detrimental effect on the NHS. If the NHS is to deliver the ambitions of the long-term plan, a stable and effective social care system is needed. That is why we need to join up services from home to hospital and have a properly integrated NHS and social care service. It is a fact that if the integration of health and social care services did take place, more would be achieved and money would be saved, as the resources would be used jointly. That would ease the access and workforce pressures that continue to present significant challenges across all care sectors.

If the Government really want to tackle this crisis, they must reinstate the levels of access to care that we had before 2010 under the last Labour Administration.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I thank Ministers and everybody at University Hospitals of Leicester for the role they played in securing the fantastic £450 million investment in our local hospitals that was announced the other day. I also thank Ministers for the role they have played in today’s announcement that there will be a new £46 million investment in an urgent care hub at Kettering General. That means that constituents at both ends of my constituency will benefit from huge new investments. I am incredibly grateful.

Those are not the only pieces of good news my constituency has had recently. We have the gleaming new treatment centre at St Luke’s in Market Harborough. We have had the wonderful news that we will be keeping the world-leading children’s heart unit at Glenfield—a service that is not just brilliant for everybody in this country, but through the charity Healing Little Hearts provides help for people across the entire world. We also have the futuristic new A&E at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Those things are all great, but the investment we are about to receive will be even more transformational.

The Secretary of State came to the Royal Infirmary the other day. As we walked around, we heard about both the challenges and the opportunities that we have locally. We saw the difficulty of working in maternity when it is split across two sites. When my son was born just two weeks ago, I saw how having two different sites meant that the staff had to work all day without breaks to fit us in. Their lives and patients’ lives will be much better when we have a single new maternity hospital. As we walked around with the Secretary of State, we saw the brilliance of our intensive care staff, but we also saw that they were working in fundamentally out-of-date facilities. We saw the brilliant work that the A&E team were doing, particularly in enhancing data to improve services, but we also saw the incredible growth in demand for those services.

The investment we are about to get means a new maternity hospital, a new children’s hospital, two super-intensive care units with 100 beds in total and a planned new major treatment centre at Glenfield Hospital, as well as modernised wards, new operating theatres, new imaging facilities and, brilliantly, new additional car parking. Anybody who has ever tried to park at Leicester Royal Infirmary will realise that that is a huge boon. These local improvements are part of a wider series of improvements we are making across the NHS. It is great that we now have a long-term plan for the NHS, with a long-term budget for the NHS that allows NHS managers and staff to plan for the future.

[Jim Shannon]

I very much welcome the Government’s commitment and the money they have set aside, but is the hon. Gentleman aware that 16 million people in England live with the pain of a musculoskeletal condition? How will the Government ensure that people with arthritis are able to access the interventions that need to be in place—from joint replacement operations to physiotherapy—in a timely fashion? I think there is an opportunity to address those issues. I have the same problems in my constituency, but it is a devolved matter. I have been made aware of this issue in England. Does he agree that it is time for that?

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and I was about to come on to it. It is great that we are making record investment in services such as mental health and spending more than we did before. It is great that we are introducing new targets, such as basic standards for help with eating disorders. It is great that we have more doctors, more nurses and more money. However, we are conscious, as we speak to people in the NHS, that unless we can deal with the sources of demand, fundamentally we will never be able to spend enough on all the priorities, including musculoskeletal services.

What do we need to tackle those causes of demand? We of course need the long-term plan for social care. The Minister needs to stick to his guns on public health: the sugar tax has worked. Things like the campaign against the anti-vaxxers and their pseudo-science are incredibly important, as is action on preventive social care. We should keep going with things such as the migrant health charge, which is raising money for the NHS; we could increase it. We should keep going on technology. It is so important for Ministers to help GPs to upgrade their telephone triage facilities, which would make the experience of using primary care so much better and reduce the burden.

Some of the things in the Queen’s Speech are incredibly important to help deal with these growing burdens. We need new technologies, which is why it is important to get more clinical trials going more quickly. That is why I welcome the measures in the Queen’s Speech. This is about building on the life sciences review—the Bell review—and it is very important to build on the work that the academic health science networks are doing. The potential advantage of our NHS is that it should be one of the best places in the world to do clinical trials—we have the scale—but at the moment there are too many gatekeepers and too many things stopping them.

Last but not least, there is the wonderful improvement in the NHS safety body that we are creating. From personal experience, I can say that when my daughter was born some things went wrong. We had a wonderful junior registrar who did lots of things right, but a few things went wrong, and my wife gave birth without anaesthetic. After that, unfortunately, her placenta did not deliver and the consultant—we never found out who this was—removed the placenta manually with no anaesthetic, and it was incredibly painful for my wife.

It is important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, that we learn lessons in the NHS without attributing blame. Not attributing blame was one of the fundamental recommendations following the Mid Staffs inquiry: we have got to be able to learn lessons. When we started to complain about what happened to my wife, people closed ranks. My wife is a doctor, and we would never in a million years have sued the NHS, but they did not know that. We never even found out who the consultant was who had got things wrong, so I do not know whether the lessons were learned from that mistake; I hope they were.

Having a no-blame culture, having this new body and learning from the experiences of painful things such as the Bawa-Garba case are the ways in which we can have truth and reconciliation, with a system that learns. One of the most important things we could ever do to improve the NHS is to make it a self-improving system that is constantly learning and constantly getting better.