Mental Health and NHS Performance Update

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ribeiro (Con)]

My Lords, from these Benches I welcome my noble friend to his new position on the Front Bench and pay credit, as he did, to the work that the noble Lord, Lord Prior, did before him.

The Statement suggests that, during this period of exceeding challenge to the hospital sector, with clinical leaders attempts will be made to,

“suspend elective care, including, where appropriate, suspension of non-urgent out-patient appointments”.

I was rather distressed to hear on the “Today” programme of a patient with oesophageal cancer having either his treatment or his admission delayed—it sounded like it was his admission. As a surgeon, I felt particularly uncomfortable about that. I hope that the Minister can give some reassurance that when it comes to treating patients with cancer, irrespective of the pressures a hospital is under, provision must be made to admit those patients, because any delay can have a long-term effect on them.

Although I accept that there have been 11,400 more doctors since 2010—and that is a very reassuring figure—we must also remember that the intake into medicine has changed significantly over the past 10 or 20 years. There is now probably a majority of female doctors coming into medical school, so the workforce is feminising and changing. Whether we like it or not, many of them will have children, will have family commitments and will wish to work part-time, or less than full-time. When we talk about numbers, it is important that we talk about whole-time equivalents rather than the ballpark figure. It looks like a lot of doctors coming into the system, but we must take into consideration that many of them will work less than full-time, so we may well need to increase the medical workforce, perhaps asking them to work in a different way than they do currently.

I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that, but I welcome his comments about mental health. I hope that greater provision will be made to ensure that patients with mental health issues have as much support as possible, as he said.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his kind words of welcome. On the specific issue raised on the “Today” programme, which I believe is the subject of a documentary, and how it relates to the Statement made by my right honourable friend, there is an important distinction, which is that it is at the discretion of local clinical leaders. It is not a blanket mandate to delay treatment where the ethical and clinical responsibilities of those treating a given patient require it to be done speedily.

On the issue of the workforce changing, I take my noble friend’s point about what in the education world we called FTEs—full-time equivalents—and will make sure that the workforce figures I use are always expressed in those terms.