NHS Long Term Plan Debate

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Lord Bird

Main Page: Lord Bird (Crossbench - Life peer)
Thursday 31st January 2019

(5 years, 1 month ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Bird Portrait Lord Bird (CB)
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My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for this opportunity to talk about health.

If you really want to cheese off anybody from the health industry, when they start talking about not having enough doctors, nurses and assistants, you might choose to say, “Well, maybe the problem is that you’ve got too many patients”. I have tried that out in many places and have cheesed people off. However, when I tried it out on my GP, he said, “That’s very interesting. If I had 25% fewer people to handle, I could do a much better job than I am doing now”. The question of whether there might be too many patients rather than not enough doctors was raised by Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, the other day when he said that we spend £97 billion on curing disease and £8 billion on prevention.

I first went to school as a child after the Second World War in 1951. Back then there was social medicine, with an enormous amount of National Health Service involvement in the lives of young working-class boys—even boys from the slums—in an attempt to prevent illness. We were given so much help that I think many of us have remained healthy. That is borne out by my reaching my 73rd birthday yesterday, which is an enormous surprise if you consider all the things that I have done to myself. It has not been the National Health Service that has helped me but I am still here, and I put it down to some of that early stuff back in the slums, when they got us running around, drinking milk and water, looking at our memberships, inspecting our hair and all sorts of wonderful things like that. However, I will not go into too much detail.

I am also interested in whether it is possible to look at the National Health Service as the very epicentre of our society, reinventing the concept of health over the next 20 years. I do not think that we should leave health to doctors or nurses; you should go to them only when something goes wrong. A very nice report by the Big Issue and CILIP on libraries and the reasons for supporting them proves that £27 million was saved for the National Health Service by running libraries and attacking the problems of loneliness.

I was on the train today and met a woman who was going to Addenbrooke’s Hospital for the last session of chemotherapy on her breasts. She went with a fierceness, and I thought to myself, “God bless her”. It will increase her chance of surviving if her mental well-being is improved by a sense of happiness, hope and optimism, and that is what is created by areas outside the National Health Service. We have to reinvent the NHS so that it is the very epicentre of everything, with libraries, schools, universities and prisons all linked together.