Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Jo Churchill and David Mowat(7 years, 9 months ago)
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David Mowat
One of the criteria by which STPs are being judged is the extent to which they are making this tilt from secondary into primary care, exactly as the hon. Lady suggests. That is precisely why the extra funding for primary care that I have set out is so important and why it is happening.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
“General Practice Forward View” talks about supporting general practice to improve digital technology for patients. Given the recent data challenges, does the Minister agree that putting a national data guardian on a statutory footing to protect patients and professionals is becoming an imperative?
David Mowat
I know that my hon. Friend has introduced a private Member’s Bill in this area, and the Government intend to support it.
Pharmacies and Integrated Healthcare: England
Debate between Jo Churchill and David Mowat(7 years, 11 months ago)
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David Mowat
That is of course a valid concern. We are trying to make progress on having GP services open for much longer than they have been historically, including weekend opening. Several colleagues have made the point—the Murray review also addressed this—that there is occasionally a barrier between the attitudes of some GPs and what can be done by pharmacists. That is true. We must be conscious that it behoves us to try to encourage the breaking down of that barrier, and misplaced professional pride must not prevent us from doing things to the best extent. Putting some pharmacists in GP practices—particularly with new models of working in which more disciplines tend to work together and a GP does not just work on his own—is an important part of that.
Jo Churchill
There is a barrier, but again, those services are used in different ways. My independent community pharmacist in Bury St Edmunds dispenses around 18,000 or 19,000 prescriptions in the town and provides all these ancillary services. He also has a dispensing practice in a GP surgery, which he is looking to automate, to make it more streamlined and cost-effective. Those services are two slightly different things, and I would worry if there were too much of an idea that they service the same thing.
David Mowat
They are different, but my point was somewhat different: optimising the use of the pharmacist profession could facilitate the breaking down of barriers and some of the care home activities that have to happen.
I will leave a couple of minutes for my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans to respond, so I will not talk in detail about the value for money aspect, other than to repeat the point—Opposition Members made a couple of interventions about this—that overpaying for a dispensing service is not the way to facilitate a much more clinically-based and service-based approach. The way to facilitate that is to get the appropriate remuneration models and revenue streams in place, and that is what we are determined to do. In the end, that is what we expect to be judged on, and I hope that we will be judged on it. With that, I will let my hon. Friend summarise.
Social Care Funding
Debate between Jo Churchill and David Mowat(8 years ago)
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David Mowat
The hon. Lady made two points, both of which I agree with. The first was that in Scotland there has been a 9% reduction in delayed transfers of care. It is also true that in England many parts of our system, particularly those that have integrated most quickly, have achieved reductions of that size and more. She is right that the STPs are part of the process of re-engineering the system. Adult social care and the integration of adult social care are a big part of that and we need to ensure that we deliver.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that better integration could be driven by better patient data, which could help to show us where quality practices exist and how to spread best practice?
David Mowat
I do agree. I had a discussion with the Care Quality Commission on the dataset that is reported, and I hope that over the next months and years we can improve how we do that.