Paediatric Care: Wating Times

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I like to think that we have good contact on this, centred around, as I said, Start for Life, which is a £300 million joint programme between ourselves and the Department for Education. There are also other things; for example, noble Lords might remember me mentioning the Bradford pilot previously, where we are looking at children’s scores in test environments and using those where there may be early indicators of ADHD or other neurodiverse needs. There is quite a bit of work going on in this space. No doubt we could always work more closely, but there is some promising work being done.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, looking at the waiting lists, there is clearly an issue of different needs and levels of seriousness in the conditions that people are suffering. Can my noble friend the Minister tell us what sort of prioritisation process has been put in place to make sure that those who need care immediately are prioritised over those who could possibly wait a little longer?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Probably the best example of that is in the whole area of cancer, which we all agree has to be the absolute priority. We have set up children’s cancer networks precisely around that. They are also set up so we can do whole genome sequencing for all children with cancer and start to introduce specific point-of-care medicines especially for them. These are examples of where we are saying that this really is the priority and that it is what we will devote all our resources to.