Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Lords Chamber

In the case of prescribing, the patient wants something done and will not be told that there is nothing to be done to help him, but the poor old GP does the best he can, so he writes another prescription. If noble Lords have ever had to clear up after an elderly relative who has died, they will have discovered in the medicine cabinet loads of prescribed medicines that were never taken, never used. As my noble friend Lord Rea said, I am not suggesting for one moment that the health service is perfect, but this Bill is not the way to remedy that kind of deficiency. So I have two hopes: first, that my noble friend divides the House on this issue, because it is so fundamental that we really ought to hear the voices as to who goes one way and who goes the other. I also hope that enough noble Lords vote for this amendment so that we can start as best we can to rescue the health service that we love.

[Lord Ribeiro]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Mawhinney for referring to the words, “motherhood and apple pie”, because when I first saw this amendment, that is the way it looked. When one reads proposed subsections (1), (2)—or parts of it— (4), (5) and (6), they seem pretty innocuous. However, in proposed subsection (2), we are talking about high principles, which none of us would disagree with—principles which crop up time and again throughout the Bill. Quality—something that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, referred to in a speech a few weeks ago —equity, integration, accountability are all points that we will address in the coming weeks, and are fundamental aspects of this Bill. However, the phrase “not the market” is not a principle—it is a mechanism for delivering what one wants.

The noble Lord, Lord Peston, said that any form of market would turn the NHS into a privatised industry. May I remind him that during the time of the previous Administration, we had independent sector treatment centres? What were they if not an example of a market-driven industry? They were introduced—

[Lord Peston]

I was not a Minister in that Government, so I do not have to defend them.

[Lord Ribeiro]

At least the noble Lord recognises that it was something that happened, and that it was a market. It was deliberately introduced by the previous Government. Were it not for the fact that NHS consultants were excluded from working in that area, it achieved the objective it was designed to do, which was to reduce waiting list numbers. However, it was a market, so if we were to accept proposed subsection (2), we would effectively say that we must call an end to all forms of privatised healthcare provision that currently exist in the NHS. I think that noble Lords would agree that this would not be acceptable.

Proposed subsection (3) talks about restructuring and reorganisation. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, addressed this very effectively when she said that we do not want to encapsulate the NHS in aspic, creating rigidity rather than flexibility. The previous time the House debated the health service, I made reference to the decision that had been made on Chase Farm. It had taken 17 years for it to be made. If we were to accept proposed new subsection (3), effectively every constituent of Chase Farm would have a very good legal reason to challenge why that reorganisation had taken place. While I am fully supportive of the idea in Amendment 52 of having the NHS constitution clearly laid out—we all agree with, understand and support it—I am not in agreement that the five principles as set out in Amendment 1 should be accepted in their present form. If it came to a vote, I would certainly oppose the amendment.

[Lord Bichard]

I have some sympathy with the suggestion that we should set out at the beginning of the Bill the values and principles on which the service is based. My difficulty is that I fear the amendment is not appropriate or adequate in its current form. Therefore, I will be unable to support it for reasons that other noble Lords have given, and for two others in particular.

First—and others may find this provocative—the NHS is still not driven often enough by the primacy of patient care. It is not, therefore, enough to say that the primacy of patient care will not be compromised by structural or financial reorganisations. We should surely be much more positively committed to the need to redesign services around patients, and I thought that that was one of the major purposes of the Bill. It is difficult to believe that in a modern world we can be content that people should stay in accident and emergency departments for four hours and longer. That is a question not just of resources but the way in which we design the service and the primacy we give to the patient. We cannot be comfortable that that is happening enough. I agree that we should not have more structural reorganisation, but that in itself is not enough. We should positively redesign our services.

The second reason why it is difficult to agree with this particular amendment is that if we are going to have a clear statement of values and principles, they should be clearly directed at the commissioning agent itself—the service—not to contractual providers. They should be built into contracts and specifications, and the service should ensure that these are taken seriously. I am afraid that the amendment seems to be muddled in that respect, and we cannot expect people performing functions to behave in a way that the commissioning agent is not specifying and requiring. Therefore, the values should be directed primarily at the commissioning agent.

I regret that I cannot support the amendment; I would like to see a clear statement of values early in the Bill, but this is not it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Turnberg]

In speaking to these amendments, I am conscious that we are hamstrung by the fact that we have an education and training regulation or Bill to follow. So there is much to come. However, education is so important and so much an integral part of every aspect of the NHS that we must have some recognition of that in this Bill. It is just not possible to imagine a health service run by an uneducated workforce. I am obviously in support of all these amendments, and I am delighted that the Government have got their own helpful amendment in there, but there is much that remains to be clarified. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I go over some of these just a little. I should state my own interests of having spent most of my working life deeply involved in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education.

It is vitally important for the Secretary of State to take on responsibility for education and training in the NHS. It is how that responsibility is fulfilled that I want to focus on, by examining where the potential risks lie in this Bill to the system that we currently have in place and, indeed, where we might take advantage of the Bill to look for improvements in the way that we operate now. I will concentrate on medical education as the system I know best.

At the moment, GPs and hospital specialists are trained using a range of curriculums designed and delivered by the medical royal colleges. The colleges assess the trainees and set their exams, and all of this has to be approved by the General Medical Council. The GMC is the competent body set up under EU law that has to ensure that the training programmes reach the minimum standards set by the EU. It has to be said that in the UK we are way above those minimum standards. All of that is relatively straight-forward. But most of the actual delivery of all this training has to take place locally, at GP practices and hospitals. It is here that we have to be very careful as the NHS moves into its new mode of working.

At this level, the royal colleges have oversight of training through their own regional adviser network, while the postgraduate deans and their teams make sure that the conditions for training are right and that the trainees go through the programmes supervised by local programme directors. They are available in every major discipline and speciality. So there is a complex network for direct oversight of postgraduate education which currently works reasonably well.

However, it is the deans who carry the heavy responsibility of the budget for salaries for all of the trainees. They pay their salaries and they can, theoretically, withdraw funding for trainees if trusts fail to provide the right conditions for training. So the postgraduate deans are absolutely critical and yet their role is threatened as the strategic health authorities which now employ them seem to be disappearing. The deans have enormous power, and budgetary responsibility, but where will they go, and who will appoint and employ them now? I believe that it makes a lot of sense to think about them being employed somehow by the proposed new Health Education England when that is set up, but meanwhile it will be critically important not to lose them. Uncertainty about their future is not a good recipe for them to function effectively. They need some certainty now.

Leaving the deans aside for the moment, it is clear that the current system is dependent on close-working collaboration between them and the royal colleges, the GMC and, at the local level, the consultants and GPs doing the training. All this is going on in an NHS busily providing services for patients at the same time. This is the second threat to education, because it is increasingly evident that the service pressures on consultants and GPs are limiting their capacity to provide the teaching. They are increasingly feeling that the time available to teach is being eroded as service pressures build up. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that is more obvious now. The fear is that this will get worse unless—this is the key—we place a duty on the commissioners of the service for them to fund the extra sessions that consultants need to teach their trainees. One alternative might be for the postgraduate deans to have a budget for these sessions, but I suspect that this would not meet with much favour. I personally am not moved by it. It is a responsibility that we have to place on the commissioners.

Finally, I want to mention the public health doctors and their training in the brave new world. They are in some disarray, as I understand it from the public health doctors themselves. The directors of public health are to be transferred to the employment of local authorities. That makes some sense, at least on the face of it. But there may well be difficulties. They may find that the local authority terms and conditions are significantly different from the NHS terms. That may affect recruitment and retention. I have a fear of a return to the days of the medical officer of health, who was in the local authority, rather a rather sad figure remote from the medical community at large. However, rather more important is the training and education of public health doctors. It is quite unclear where the local authorities sit in relation to meeting the needs of those trainees in what is a vital medical discipline. It may be that all of this has been thought through. If so, it would be helpful to hear about it. The public health community certainly needs to know.

Meanwhile, I think that a better solution all round would be for the public health doctors to be employed by Public Health England and for them to be seconded to the local authorities. That might be more satisfactory all round, and it would give some security to the education and training of this key professional group.

I have not spoken about nursing education, not because it is not important—it clearly is—but because we are coming to it later in the Bill, and at least some aspects of nurse training and education will come in later clauses. I am sure that we will return to that. For the moment, I want to support this group of amendments, including that of the Government. But it seems entirely possible, I fear, that there will be further amendments at a later stage to try to tease out some of the issues I have been discussing.

[Lord Ribeiro]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Walton of Detchant and Lord Patel, for introducing this amendment. It highlights not only the importance of education and training in advance of the report that we will receive later in the autumn from the Future Forum group, but the fact that the Government have responded with an amendment of their own. That identifies the importance of bringing it on to the face of the Bill, so much so that it is right at the very beginning of Part 1. It is one of six duties that the Secretary of State now has to perform. That is very important.

It is quite understandable in a Chamber such as this one, full of doctors, that we tend to overemphasise the importance of medical education. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, rightly said, nursing will be discussed later. However, it is not just about nursing. My wife is a physiotherapist—there are physiotherapists, radiographers and other healthcare workers as well. That is why the Government’s amendment talks about education and training without qualifying exactly which areas we are discussing. It is important that we bear that in mind.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, I think, referred earlier to the independent sector treatment centres and the lack of training in that area. I must declare an interest as a past president of the Royal College of Surgeons. I had countless negotiations with the Department of Health to put into place a requirement for independent sector treatment centres to be able to train. The big issue was that all the surgeons and the ISTCs were overseas doctors. No UK doctors were allowed to train. We asked for a way in which we could introduce NHS consultants into what was effectively spare elective capacity. I fundamentally believe that we must separate emergency and elective surgery to produce the best-quality care for patients.

As a consultant, I would regularly do an out-patients’ clinic at Basildon hospital on Mondays. If I was also on call, as I sometimes was, I could be told that there was a patient in the emergency department who needed urgent treatment. That would ruin my out-patients’ clinic because I would have to go to theatre and sort out that patient. Our last assessment showed that 64 per cent of the general surgeons in Great Britain and Ireland have a responsibility to be on call while they are doing elective work. If you have that degree of commitment to doing two things, you cannot provide the best possible care for your patients. If NHS consultants could structure their work so that it was possible to work in a centre which was perhaps in the hospital—there are a few hospitals, including one in Nottingham, with elective centres within the hospital—or perhaps outside, they would be able to take their registrar and SHO to the independent sector and they would be able learn how to carry out the surgery.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

Perhaps I may ask for clarification from the noble Lord. I am not sure whether he is advocating that the duty in the government amendment should or should not be on every provider, whichever sector it is in. I tried to make it clear that I felt that the duty to provide education should be on everyone who provides patient services. I was hoping that the Minister would clarify that that was what was in the Government’s mind, so that history—what had happened before—could not be replicated.

[Lord Ribeiro]

I accept that point, although it might be difficult to implement when you consider the third sector and the voluntary sector, which may not be in a position to undertake education and training. That is a point to bear in mind.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

Forgive me but, as someone who works hugely in the voluntary sector and is a patron of many of the healthcare providers, perhaps I may point out that they carry out a great deal of education. An example is Marie Curie running NVQ courses for care assistants across the whole country. They are trying to drive up the standard of care given by people who are absolutely not at the medical end but whose care is critical to the quality of service that patients receive.

[Lord Ribeiro]

The noble Baroness makes her case but there is a wide spectrum of medical provision, and the question is whether this could be applied to every single provider. I am not clear about that but perhaps the Minister will be able to address it.

Returning to the question of training, I believe that through the Bill there is an opportunity, perhaps when the contracts for some of the independent sector treatment centres are up for renewal, to give some serious thought to whether these centres could provide the extra capacity that the NHS desperately needs if it is to go forward with the functional separation of emergency and elective care. I am of course talking about surgery and I recognise that that is a special case. None the less, we come from a history of one type of surgical provision to the situation in this Bill. If we are talking about quality as the indicator of the outcomes that we are looking for, it may well be possible to achieve this by utilising the ISTCs for NHS consultants. I shall give way if the noble Lord wishes to speak.

[Lord Winston]

I had no intention of interrupting the noble Lord. I merely thought that he was concluding his remarks and I was going to follow.

[Lord Ribeiro]

I take the distinct hint that it is time to conclude my remarks. I merely wish to say that we have an amendment in the Government’s name. It may well have been prompted by noble Lords introducing their own amendment, but the fact is that it is now there in the Bill.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I was interested to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, thought that the Chamber was full of doctors. I suspect that if we were discussing a legal matter, it would be full of lawyers, or if it was a matter relating to the City, it would be full of industrialists and so on. It depends on the nature of the Bill. It is very good that the Chamber is currently full of doctors because, like the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, we can give special credibility to the discussions and amendments that we are trying to tease out. It is a pity that there are not more members of the nursing profession in the Chamber, as well as others who are involved with healthcare and its wider applications.

--- Later in debate ---

I could go on but I will not. I just want to deal with what is becoming an urban myth about private providers of elective surgery services and their attitude to training. For my sins—it is a good confessional evening for me—I was responsible for negotiating wave 2 of the ISTC programme with the private sector. The private sector wanted more training responsibilities. It had been cut out of training in wave 1—a mistake—and it wanted training because it thought it would get better doctors working in its centres if they had a training function. Doctors in those centres wanted to see doctors in training, watching them and learning their trade in that setting, because those centres would be doing a very high volume of elective surgery, so you needed to use that. It has been put about in some rather strange way that the private sector did not want to do that. Frankly, it was not even in its commercial interests not to do that, so it is becoming a bit of an urban myth that it was trying to duck its responsibilities in the area of training.

[Lord Ribeiro]

I should just like to acknowledge that the references that I made earlier were to wave 1. I fully recognise and appreciate the work done by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in trying to get a training contract with the private sector. However, there was a determination on the part of the Government when ISTCs were first introduced to keep the NHS consultants and trainees out of those centres.

[Lord Warner]

I ought to make clear that I was not launching an attack on the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, with whom I had an excellent relationship as a Minister when he was president of the Royal College of Surgeons.

I finish by saying that although we are making progress on this Bill by having amendments of this kind early on, it is important to realise their limitations. A number of noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Turnberg, have raised a whole raft of issues which still need to be grappled with. This may be the first of a number of debates we have on the issue of education and training as we try to strengthen the Bill in this area.