Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Lords Chamber

I fear that just saying that they can go and complain locally, or that they can go to their local healthwatch, is not going to be enough. They may find that they are in a long queue or in a complaints system that they find difficult. I hope that the Minister might respond that guidance and regulations will deal with this and will provide clear pathways for patients and others who wish to question decisions. I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness’s amendment, particularly because it extends the implicit obligations under Clause 3 from the individual to the locality. It includes individual access, of course, but it speaks in terms of an equitable service being commissioned either for the individual patient’s condition or in their locality, and that enhances to a considerable degree the provision of Clause 3 and its proposed amendment to the 2006 Act. The drafting of proposed new Section 1B is a little odd, it might be thought. The intention is clearly good, but,

“have regard to the need to reduce inequalities between the people of England”,

is a slightly curious phrase. It might be asked, between the people of England and what? The drafting could be improved by the time we get to—actually it will not, as we are on Report. Perhaps it is capable of being improved, let us say.

The noble Baroness has touched on the broader issue of the locality, which raises issues of how the Government might pursue their objectives, which are shared by all sides of the House. There are different organisations in the new structure that will have a responsibility to promote equality, which will include the clinical commissioning groups and the health and well-being boards. Some mechanism ought to provide accountability for both those bodies. In particular, the need to promote equal treatment in a patient-centred service ought to be very much part of the joint strategic needs assessment that should be undertaken by the health and well-being boards, and ought to influence the commissioning. We hope that these regulations will establish that connection and, as the noble Baroness has suggested, lay down a clear structure, though not one that is too prescriptive—a pathway, as she usefully put it, for patients, individually or, as it were, collectively, to raise the issues that concern them through healthwatch.

There is another route that I hope the noble Baroness will agree would be helpful. Local authorities retain the duty of scrutiny of local health services. For that matter, inequalities can arise on the social care side of the health and social care world. Local authorities therefore provide an additional route that would repay further consideration. It ought to be feasible for a health and scrutiny committee, and I serve on one in my own authority, to have regard to the level and type of complaints regarding not only equitability but the standard of service in all parts of the health and social care services in that locality. Therefore, it would be useful if the Minister could liaise with the Local Government Association, perhaps to produce some kind of working model for dealing with this aspect. For example, it may be that the Centre for Public Scrutiny could, in conjunction with the department, the LGA and HealthWatch itself, representing patients, come up with a model that authorities could adopt and promote among their populations to provide clear recourse for dealing with difficulties and complaints about either individual treatment or collective provision that is a matter of local concern.

I hope the Minister will accept the thrust of the amendment and, even if it is not built into the Bill, that action can be taken to fulfil the aspirations that the noble Baroness has outlined.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

My Lords, briefly, I should like some clarification on this amendment, and I hope that the Minister will be able to provide just that in summing up. There seems to be a real difficulty here. The architecture of the Bill says that we should have a Commissioning Board and local commissioning groups, and that those local commissioning groups will have a great deal of autonomy over the services that they commission—for example, the drug pathways that they permit—in treating particular patients. This amendment appears to say that if the treatment given through the commissioning pathway of one commissioning group is different from that of another commissioning group, you would therefore have recourse to action if you felt, for instance, that the drug regime in one group was unacceptable. Perhaps I could have clarification on that. It is important because there will be that sort of difference in provision, regardless of whether we agree to the local commissioning group position.