Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I am the least qualified contributor to the debate, so I shall make my speech suitably short as an act of humility in deference to those who are so much my senior in this field. It was the Mid Staffordshire disaster and the reports following it which focused public attention on the risks to patients in the health service in this country. It is appropriate that it was my kinsman, Jeremy Lefroy, the honourable Member for Stafford, who brought the Bill to the other place. I congratulate him and my noble friend on the style in which they have done it.

I share the anxiety of many of your Lordships about the fact that it has to be debated in a truncated form. We are diminishing the effectiveness of this House if we do not give it the full treatment. On the other hand, we have to balance the possibility that there will be no opportunity in the next Parliament—depending on what political colour emerges from the election—and that it is better to take what we can get than to hope to get a lot more.

In trying to express that, I was looking for a simile. When my eye fell on the mammoth legislation proposed by the law commissions, I realised that the simile for me is that the Bill is like a dolphin leaping just under the bows of a mammoth tanker. We need the mammoth tanker but the dolphin has its own value, in ways which my noble friends have already so adequately explained.

Two phrases caught my attention in the debate. The first was the need for a culture change. I am not actually sure what the other was. However, it seems that we are looking at the mechanisms to regulate people in the health service but not looking at the people themselves. What is needed for the prevention of harm is that first of all qualities laid down by the lady with the lamp, Florence Nightingale: tender loving care.

When I read stories of elderly people and demented people being brutally treated, I recall my very short time as a Minister in the Department of Health, when I was given special responsibility for mental health—for only six months, which was probably a good thing. I visited a large number of hospitals and wards specialising in mental health and what astounded me was the patience of the people looking after the affected ill. When I hear of the very different treatment of people with mental afflictions now, particularly in old people’s homes and nursing homes but elsewhere as well, it strikes me that that conduct could not have been perpetrated by the people whom I saw nursing in those institutions.

Apart from these mechanisms for regulating people in the service, what we need is some procedure to identify those who are fitted for particular parts of that service. The person who is perfectly adequate, even brilliant, as a theatre nurse might find that her patience snaps after six months looking after people who are doubly incontinent, incapable of speech or intermittently violent. That must go also for those dealing with people with dementia, who are unable to recall who or where they are and ask the same question 75 times a day. That requires very special characteristics, which need to be identified, and the people who have them need to be directed where the work is most difficult.

I hope that the Bill gets on to the statute book. While I understand the enthusiasm of those who want to make it perfect, I repeat my position: it is very much better than leaving it to chance. All the authorities should be singing from the same hymn sheet in the coming years, and the enormous legislation proposed by the law commissions should be enacted as soon as possible. I have detained your Lordships long enough. I might say that I have come to the place where there is a dotted line on my paper, which says “Cut here”—and, unlike my noble friend, I will.