Lord O'Shaughnessy
Main Page: Lord O'Shaughnessy (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Manzoor
That is almost all my brief. I echo the sentiments expressed by the noble Lord about my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy. The noble Lord is basically asking about next steps and who will be accountable for the plans. That is the question I asked: who is in charge? NHS Improvement and Health Education England are looking at workforce planning and clinical placements for nurses. They will relate to NHS England which is looking at the overall framework. The intention is that the work that my noble friend Lady Harding will be taking on will feed into workforce planning, and we will produce an overall framework in relation to clinical issues. A template will also be produced so that we know what best practice is, and this can then be filtered down to local areas through the integrated care system and clinical commissioning groups. NHS England will retain the overall strategy for all this. I hope that I have answered the noble Lord’s questions. As he knows, there are variations and a number of health inequalities around the country. It is imperative that we begin to address those and that is behind part of the framework.
Lord O'Shaughnessy (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend and other noble Lords for their kind words. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with them on health and social care issues over the last two years, as well as with the amazing staff in our health and social care system, who inspire us, treat us and look after us all the time. Like my noble friend, I am incredibly proud that in the 70th year of the NHS it is a Conservative Government who are making this historic funding settlement. However, I believe that this is an important document for another reason, which is that it marks a significant milestone in moving towards truly personal care that delivers precision medicine designed for individuals and better uses technology and the kinds of genomic medicines and innovations that the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, talked about. It became clear to me during my time as a Minister that this can happen only if we complete the digitalisation and joining up of patients’ data so that, wherever patients land in the health system, any clinician has access to all the relevant information about them and can tailor treatments to them. Not only does that bring tremendous benefits for direct care but it has a huge positive impact on our life sciences industry, which is one of the great strengths of this country and one of our great hopes for the future. Can my noble friend confirm that the long-term plan involves the ambition of fully digitising the NHS and bringing that data together for the benefits that I have described?
Baroness Manzoor
I thank my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy for his comments. Of course, data and information are very important. It is very difficult for clinicians when they do not have good information and data, because they have to start again, asking questions and looking at the investigations that have been undertaken on a particular patient. Therefore, the future lies in the greater use of technology and data-sharing but, at the same time, this must be balanced with ensuring that safeguards regarding who accesses the data are put in place, as well as ensuring that the data is accessed with the patient’s consent.