Health and Care Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very reluctant to intervene in this long debate, but I have travelled down from Manchester specifically for this group of amendments. I have not been involved with this Bill previously, partly because of my own ill health, and also because of my teaching outside London, but I will make a short intervention here.

My noble friend Lord Hunt has raised the very important issue of the nature of interaction between human beings, which is absolutely essential in considering some of the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and others. I am not going to advocate music therapy, dance therapy, exercise therapy or art therapy here, because, speaking as an academic, one of the problems here is that we simply do not understand the truth of the interaction that makes these things work. One of the big problems is that really good randomised controlled trials are still very much lacking.

I am reminded, for example, of a very good randomised controlled trial, by Dr Nair in Australia, of quite a large number of demented people in a care home to whom he played music. From his results, there was no question but that the music, which was extremely tranquil baroque music from sixteen different composers, actually made them more disturbed, more sleepless, more angry, less able to eat their food and more likely to come into conflict with the nursing staff.

So it is very unclear what is actually happening in the brain. During the debate today we have heard claims made about changes in brain structure, but the truth is that we have not done sufficient research to really be clear about this. The research is very expensive, and one of the problems is that it involves very complex things such as time on scanning machines, for example—functional MRI. There is simply not enough research going on into the dementias—whatever they are—to fully understand the nature of what we are talking about.

I am not suggesting that we do not do music therapy but, speaking with my interest as an ex-chairman of the Royal College of Music, I say that we have seen that some of the things we do simply do not work or, if they do, it is not understood how. One of the things with music therapy, for example, is that you see individual patients interacting with somebody else, and it may be that the interaction is more important than the actual music. For example, watching musicians play in person may be better than watching them on a screen or just listening to music. There is a lot of work that needs to be done here before we can make big claims.

These are important amendments that are well made and well put, but we need to be really clear in debating this legislation that, until we understand the mechanisms—the phenotype—of what we are discussing, we have to recognise also that much more money is required for research into the dementias. That is really critical and there is a risk here of making legislation that will not fundamentally change the real problem that we are facing.

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to say that Amendment 297A is obviously very desirable. But, as an economist, I have to say: if we implement this, who will be deprived? GPs’ time is limited and GPs’ numbers are limited, as we all know. Through much of my life in the NHS, all that the GP did for me was prescribe what I needed. It took about five minutes, and the GP did not even have to talk to me; they could look at the computer to find out who I was and what I was doing. It is, quite rightly, only people over 65 who need a caring GP, so we have to devise a system for those who do not need extensive consultation and familiarity with the GP but can be dealt with in a summary fashion. Perhaps we could have junior and senior GPs, so that we could release the senior GPs for this sort of work and have other people for prescriptions and simple tasks.