NHS (Five Year Forward View)

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Jeremy Hunt

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I hope I can reassure the hon. Lady, because today’s announcement includes £1.5 billion extra for the NHS front line next year. That will include mental health services, and we would expect commissioners to observe parity of esteem as they decide how to allocate those additional resources. It also includes £1 billion to improve primary care facilities, which will be used by many mental health patients. There is a lot in today’s announcement that I hope will relieve pressure. She is right to say that we need to do better on child and adolescent mental health services. This has been a long-standing problem, but we have been taking forward some important work to make a reality of our commitment to parity of esteem, which is something we are very proud to have legislated for.

[Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

May I report to my right hon. Friend that, despite the dismal rant he heard from the shadow Secretary of State, the Princess Royal hospital in Haywards Heath and the Royal Sussex county hospital in Brighton, and their doctors and nurses, are doing a magnificent job in treating local people? Will he also accept that the problem with mental health services in this country goes back a long way? It will not be fixed overnight. I have had the same problem in my constituency of someone being put in a police cell. The problem fell entirely on the staff of the local trust, who simply did not deal with the matter properly. This is going to take a long time to fix, and I greatly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement.

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his comment, because the use of police cells is not an issue with which we should be playing party political games. As it happens, their use was much higher under the last Labour Government. We are starting to address that issue, and he is right: even one person spending a night inappropriately in a police cell is one person too many. That is why we are making good progress, but in the end it will require people who purchase health care in local areas to look at people with mental health needs in a holistic way—not just trying to solve issues problem by problem, but looking at and addressing the whole problem and making sure they get the treatment they need.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Jeremy Hunt

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jeremy Hunt]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to the House and congratulate him on representing in his constituency a fantastic hospital; I have been to Wythenshawe hospital and it is superb. Some big changes are happening in the Greater Manchester area that will lead to that part of the country having some of the best NHS care in the country. Obviously there is a difficult transition in A and E services between Trafford and Wythenshawe, and I am happy to meet him to discuss it further.

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is unacceptable that investigations into failures in hospital services take so very long? There has recently been one in my constituency: a very sad and badly handled case connected with mental health. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the authorities need to provide answers very promptly to families who are left completely beleaguered by such behaviour?

[Mr Hunt]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. One of the tragedies that the Francis report helped us to uncover was that so many failings had been allowed to persist for so long: in the case of Mid Staffs, between 2005 and 2009. We owe it to families to be much quicker, which is why there is now a time limit on the failure regime: hospitals must be turned around within a fixed period of time or go into administration. Otherwise, we will not have safe hospitals in our areas.

Immigrants (NHS Treatment)

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Jeremy Hunt

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The directive to which the right hon. Gentleman refers was issued by an independent NHS body, not my Department. The sorry truth is that it is consistent with the current rules on access to primary health care, which is what we believe is wrong. I think that one of the big problems in the current system is that we have free access to primary care for anyone visiting the UK, however short their visit is. Through that access to primary care, they get an NHS number, which should not entitle them to free care but is often treated by hospitals as such. That is what we have to put right. He is absolutely right that we need a system that properly identifies whether people should have care that is free at the point of access without impinging on the ease of access for British citizens, which is one of the things they treasure most about the NHS.

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is through access to primary care that the initial control must take place, but that all hospitals should have an overseas visitors manager who should be designated and required to collect overseas visitors’ moneys on a more regular basis and using a more joined-up and coherent way of working with the other agencies involved?

[Mr Hunt]

What my right hon. Friend says bears very careful consideration. He is absolutely right that primary care is a critical access point, and we need to look at that. We also need to look at the burdens we place on GPs. I think that ultimately the easy way we will do that is through proper digital patient records, which will allow NHS professionals to find out about the medical history of people accessing the NHS at any point, including whether they are likely to be eligible for free treatment.

With regard to hospitals, my right hon. Friend makes a very interesting point about an overseas visitors manager. One of the problems we have is that the incentives in the system positively disincentivise hospitals from declaring foreign users of the NHS. If they declare someone not to be entitled to free NHS care, they have to collect the money from that person themselves, whereas if they do not declare the person not to be entitled to free NHS care, they get paid automatically by their primary care trust or clinical commissioning group. The incentives in the system have acted to suggest that this is a much smaller problem than I believe it is.

Accountability and Transparency in the NHS

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Jeremy Hunt

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I obviously take on board what my hon. Friend says, but I want to move on to other aspects of the report.

[Nicholas Soames]

rose—

[Mr Hunt]

I shall give way on that point, and then I will make some progress.

[Nicholas Soames]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State. May I follow up on one point that he raised? He said that a number of those managers have disappeared or melted away to other jobs in the service. Does he agree that whatever else happened, there was a monumental failure of leadership at many levels, and that it is a failing of public services in this country—and the national health service in particular—that failing managers are too often recycled through the service to the great and constant cost of patient care?

[Mr Hunt]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. We will respond to the Francis report this month, as the Prime Minister has committed to do, and make plain measures to ensure that the situation cannot continue. My right hon. Friend is right to raise that point.