Health and Social Care

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I can indeed, and I can do so with confidence because the three chief inspectors that we propose to create—one of whom, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals, has already been appointed—will be working as part of the Care Quality Commission. They will be senior employees of the CQC and their job will certainly be to align the methodology that they use to assess good and poor care.

[Lord Kakkar]

My Lords, I declare my interest as professor of surgery and consultant surgery at University College London Hospital. During the passage of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, there was a discussion about the need to ensure that there was an ongoing focus on integrated care between community hospitals and tertiary services. This needed to be attended by a focus on the development of metrics that would describe whole pathways of care outcomes for patients. What progress has been made with regard to the development of those whole pathway metrics?

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord hits upon a point of central importance. The outcomes framework clearly sets out where the different parts of the health and care system share responsibility for outcomes and support joint working in the way that I have described. However, we are committed to developing a measure of people’s experience of integrated care for use in the outcomes frameworks. That is a work in progress. Meanwhile, a place holder was included within both the NHS and adult social care outcomes frameworks when they were refreshed in November last year. We have highlighted the development of this measure in the public health outcomes framework, so I hope to give the noble Lord further news in a few months’ time.