Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I pay tribute to the noble Lord for his work, in particular for his work with the National Patient Safety Agency. As he will know, hospital standardised mortality ratios are something of a vexed topic. Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director, has established a working group that will review how those ratios are derived and recommend what method should be used consistently for the NHS in future. The aim is to provide simple, practical guidance on how the ratios should be interpreted and used with other sources of information. Once the technical basis for this work has been developed, it is planned that patients and patient groups will be invited to become closely involved.

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, the Minister referred to seeing to it that, following the experience of Mid Staffs, more information will be given to patients. He will no doubt recall from debates in this House during the passage of the Equality Bill that research carried out by Dr Foster for RNIB, of which I am a vice-president, showed that as many as 72 per cent of patients were given information by their GP that they could not read. Even higher figures were uncovered in relation to the rest of the NHS. Will the noble Lord give a commitment that the Government will take steps to ensure that information is given in accessible formats to patients who have difficulty in reading information in ordinary print? To assist in doing this, the Government will have at their disposal the strengthened rights of access to information in accessible formats included in the Equality Bill before it passed into law.

[Earl Howe]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question, which is spot on target—if I dare use that word. The need to create more accessible information for patients is central to the Government’s agenda for creating choice. Choice is meaningless unless it is informed choice, which means rolling out choice to every patient, including those who are visually disabled. We are determined to make more information about care and safety standards and performance available to the public and staff. That should be published online and in formats accessible to all patients. I assure the noble Lord that we will bear these points closely in mind as we develop our plans.