Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

That is absolutely right. The figure that struck me on one of my many hospital visits was that apparently people lose 10% of their muscle mass each week they are in hospital, making it harder for them to look after themselves. The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, mentioned that we need to make sure the resources and investment are in the right places. All too often, hospitals become the place of last resort, when we all know that it is much better to put resources into the primary care at the front end or the social care and domestic help for physios who can visit homes at the back end. Central to the plans of my colleague, Minister Whately, is recognition that we will solve this in the long term, as all noble Lords want, only if we invest those resources in the right places.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the plan and hope that the Government can keep to the targets they have set. I had experience of being in a major London hospital recently, spending five hours in A&E. It was the first time I had been in A&E for a long time. I was surprised at the number of young people there. When eventually I was seen by a nurse, I asked why so many young people were there. She said, “We’re surprised; there was a good football match on tonight, and we thought there wouldn’t be so many”.

It is odd when people are in A&E. Should they be with a GP? We wait with interest to see the report on GPs. I suspect that we have far more people now getting involved in health, for a whole variety of reasons, than need be in the system. This takes us back to prevention. I still do not believe we are addressing prevention as we should—trying to reduce the number of people in ill health. The programmes we have on obesity and in a whole range of areas where we are trying to get people to change their lifestyle are not having any impact. Until we seriously address those and put money and personnel into them to get ourselves reasonably healthy by comparison with the rest of Europe, we will just see the health service getting into even more difficulty, no matter who is in power.

I am sorry for going on at length. I hope the Minister will say something about a proper plan on prevention.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord. We have a manifesto pledge about five years of healthier living. I am keen to do exactly that, to say, “Okay, let’s unpack this—how can we make that realistic?”. We have all talked about being realistic. What are the causes of death or ill health that we need to get on top of? I mentioned cardiovascular disease earlier. We need to quickly address that because there is a cohort of people of my age who have missed out. Obesity is a clear thing. It is not just the treatments but everything we talk about in terms of supermarkets. I know that there is some discussion in the House on whether we have gone far enough on some of those things, but the action we have taken is hitting the big numbers. It is hitting about 95% of the planned reduction in calorific intake; we are seeing that have an impact already. There is also anti-smoking; I am keen to make that into a coherent plan. We all know that we can spend more and more money on hospitals and the health service, but we will have healthier lifestyles only if we can get up stream on the problem and talk about protection.