Stoma Care

Debate between Jim Shannon and Jonathan Evans

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Evans]

I respect my hon. Friend’s views on many matters and also have only praise for stoma nurses, but that does not take away many of the concerns in relation to sponsorship. Sponsors have a direct interest in the clinical decisions made by nurses, because they are the manufacturers of the products that are being prescribed under the NHS.

If the Secretary of State for Health had proposed the introduction of such an arrangement—the sponsorship of nurses by commercial organisations—as part of his current reforms, we can imagine the outrage it would have produced. “Newsnight” and the “Today” programme would have relentlessly questioned the Minister. We might even have seen a “Panorama” special on the BBC. The reality is that this extraordinary situation started more than 30 years ago and expanded to its current pre-eminence during the years of the previous Government.

The concept was thought up not by the commercial firms themselves, but by the health care trusts, which first approached the manufacturers to explore the commercial opportunities. The Department of Health does not appear to have played any part in the dialogue, not even in terms of establishing a protocol that could reassure the public that commercial sponsorship does not impact upon clinical judgment, just as my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) has said that he is satisfied that that was not the case in his experience.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman think that it would be acceptable if sponsorship were offered to help the patient or the health board itself?

[Jonathan Evans]

I am not going to propose the end of sponsorship, but we need more robust mechanisms of managing the potential conflicts of interest. I will develop that argument in the limited time available.

The Department of Health appears to take comfort in the professional code of nurses, which states:

“You must ensure that your professional judgement is not influenced by any commercial considerations.”

Surely, we can be sure that that code is being properly observed only if the Department undertakes, at least from time to time, some assessment of the commissioning decisions being made, but it has never done so.

In January 2001, The Guardian drew the practice to wider public attention, reporting that the NHS planned to crack down on these commercial sponsorship deals. The paper claimed that more than half of stoma nurses were funded by commercial deals that were worth— remember that this was a decade ago—up to £100,000 a year to each health trust. The RCN claimed that the manufacturers specified that a minimum percentage of patients had to be fitted with the commercial sponsor’s products.

The previous Government’s response to The Guardian’s revelations was to issue new guidance requiring NHS trusts to review all such arrangements in which suppliers met all or part of the cost of members of staff, discounts on drugs and equipment, or subsidised research and training as a condition of the contract. Nevertheless, Health Ministers maintained that they did not want to prevent collaborative partnerships between the NHS and private contractors—nor do I—but they also said that clinical decisions should always be based on evidence of what was best for the patient. I agree, but how do we know? Again, the Department did not undertake any assessment of its own to reassure itself that that was being done.

By 2003, sufficient concern was being expressed over these commercial deals that the then Government launched the first of what was to be a series of consultations on the arrangements for paying appliance contractors. By 23 January 2006, the Government issued a report on the consultation, noting:

“Specific and frequent mention was made of the issue of sponsored nursing posts in secondary care, with most parties”

—I stress, “most parties”—

“feeling that this practice was inappropriate, and that it should cease.”

The Department of Health’s response to that concern was to ignore it. It maintained its policy of resisting any assessment of impact of commercial sponsorship on commissioning decisions, and that strand of concern was, interestingly, subsequently eliminated from further consultation on these matters by Health Ministers.

In Scotland, the Scottish Executive took a completely different line. The Scottish Government decided that commercial sponsors could no longer directly subsidise specialist nurses in stoma care. The nurses were taken on and paid directly by the NHS. In fact, the British Healthcare Trades Association funded transitional support to the Scottish health boards for two years because of that dramatic financial change. The outcome was also dramatic. Free samples of stoma products were withdrawn from Scottish hospitals by the manufacturers that had always previously provided them, and it is estimated that, over the following five years, the number of specialist stoma nurses in Scotland fell by up to half.

In Scotland, therefore, the policy has been to ban commercial sponsorship—this addresses the concerns expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—with a consequential fall in both the quality and the availability of specialist stoma care to patients. By contrast, the policy of Health Ministers here has been to refuse to undertake any assessment whatsoever of the impact of commercial sponsorship on these arrangements within the rest of the UK.

As I hope I have made clear, I am not arguing for the Government to follow the Scottish policy. Patient groups have made it clear to me—this is endorsed by the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire—that they recognise that the quality and the availability of stoma care in Scotland has fallen markedly. I want to make it clear that I am not questioning in any way the commitment or the concern of stoma nurses. Again, I can say that patient groups who have briefed me for this debate have made it clear that they deeply value the services that are provided by stoma nurses.

Nevertheless, as I indicated to the hon. Member for Strangford, there are real questions about conflict of interest, which successive Governments, sadly, have ignored. Let me draw an analogy with another sector that we debate a lot in the House: the financial services sector. Today, all financial services companies are required to satisfy the regulator that they have robust processes in place that are fully understood by all staff for managing conflicts of interest. Can we imagine a Minister standing at the Dispatch Box talking about concerns with financial services and saying that he is entirely satisfied there is no need for robust conflict of interest processes because he is satisfied that the professional code of those who work in financial services will always require them to act properly? That is a ludicrous proposition. There is a need for the management of conflicts to be subject to a similarly robust process in terms of stoma care.

In March 2011, Health Ministers were asked by parliamentary colleagues some basic questions to glean information on the number of stoma care nursing posts sponsored in the UK. No helpful response was provided, and the Department had no statistics to share with colleagues. So, for this debate, I have had to turn to the British Healthcare Trades Association for the figures. According to the association, stoma care manufacturers sponsor more than 200 of the 337 departments in England at a cost of £10 million a year. However, some of those manufacturers share the same concerns about commercial sponsorship that I am outlining. They only maintain their sponsorship for fear that other suppliers will otherwise corner the market. Those manufacturers have even expressed their concern to me that the current commercial arrangements might fall foul of the new Bribery Act 2010. Have Ministers undertaken any assessment of that?

On 15 October, I wrote to the Minister and received a response from him on 9 November confirming again that the Department had not made any assessment of the commissioning decisions of PCT employees sponsored by private enterprises. Again, he highlighted the fact that Ministers relied on the code of professional conduct, but he said in his letter that he was satisfied that that was a concern and that he had asked his officials to make further studies into the activity. I hope that the Minister can tell us the outcome of those studies.

The issues that I have raised relate to the maintenance of patient choice in the appliances that are prescribed for stoma care, and the concerns are shared by patients, charities and several manufacturers. Such concerns have been shown to be very well-founded by reports of recent discussions between major manufacturers of stoma care products and PCTs about what has come to be called off-script tendering, which you mentioned in the second part of your comment, Mr Hollobone. What is being proposed is that preferred or single supplier agreements are made between commissioners and manufacturers, in which the commissioning body would get a bulk discount for requiring all patients to take one manufacturer’s products. The arrangements would then bypass the operation of the drug tariff for the provision of such products, which is regularly reviewed on an annual basis by the Department.

Currently, a GP or suitably qualified nurse issues a patient with a prescription—an FP10—and the patient is free to take that to the manufacturer of their choice to have the product dispensed by a pharmacy contractor or an appliance contractor. The drug tariff industry forum considers the advantages of that system to be patient choice, cost and value for money, quality of products and a centralised system working on a local basis. The British Healthcare Trades Association has obtained legal advice that suggests the off-script arrangements being discussed by big manufacturers might be beyond the powers of health trusts. However, the question arises whether such arrangements could be taken forward as part of the Government’s health reform.

Those questions were raised by the Urology Trade Association, which is a body representing 95% of manufacturers, and by the Urology User Group Coalition on behalf of patients in evidence given last year to the Select Committee on Health. Unfortunately, follow-up questions by parliamentary colleagues confirmed the long-standing Department of Health response that no assessment of those issues had been undertaken either.

The thousands of patients who suffer bowel or bladder cancer and require ongoing stoma care deserve better. They should be assured that the Government will defend patient choice and maintain robust processes for managing real or perceived conflicts of interest in the commissioning of services. The Government should ensure the continued provision of specialist nursing advice and support and reassure us that it is in no way influenced by financial or commercial considerations.