Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Neil O'Brien and Kate Osborne(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O’Brien)
We are tackling the root causes of health inequalities. We have doubled the duty on cigarettes and brought in a minimum excise tax on the cheapest cigarettes. That has helped to drive down smoking rates from 21% to a record low of 13%. We are going further, helping a million smokers with our scheme to get people to stop smoking and start vaping. We have provided £40 million to start rolling out new weight-loss drugs and, in the major conditions strategy, we will talk further about how we will tackle health inequalities.
Kate Osborne
People in the north-east die younger than people in the rest of England and spend more years in ill health. Increased NHS waiting times leaves them on medication for longer. The north-east has the highest level of people living in poverty, leaving many of my constituents unable to afford prescription charges. Some have told me that they are taking paracetamol instead of prescribed medication, worsening health inequalities. Will the Minister commit to scrapping these unfair prescription charges?
Neil O’Brien
Nine out of 10 prescriptions are not paid for, but free at the point of delivery. On the various important points that the hon. Lady makes, tackling health inequalities is hugely important to us. That is why we are creating 160 extra community diagnostic centres, which are targeted at areas of the highest deprivation. It is why we are rolling out targeted lung health checks in 43 areas of the most deprivation. It is also why we are providing cost of living support worth about £3,300 for the average household in this country. It is one of the most generous schemes anywhere in Europe, exactly to tackle those cost of living pressures and health inequalities.
Future of the NHS
Debate between Neil O'Brien and Kate Osborne(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Neil O’Brien
It will be right across the piece. We have already set out some of our plans for social care, and the full details will hopefully be with the hon. Lady in the not-too-distant future.
The NHS recently published a delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services. It is backed by record investment, including a £1 billion dedicated fund for hospital capacity over 2023-24. We will achieve these improvements by delivering 800 new ambulances and 5,000 more sustainable, fully staffed hospital beds, as well as an ambition to scale up innovative virtual wards, which are already making huge improvements, to support 50,000 people a month in their own home.
The number of ambulance and ambulance support staff is up by 40% since 2010. As well as having those extra staff, we are putting in an extra £50 million in capital funding to upgrade and expand hospitals, including with ambulance hubs and facilities for patients who are about to be discharged. That will free up hospital beds and address handover delays, helping to get those extra ambulances swiftly back on the road.
As well as getting people to hospital, we must further prevent the need for urgent care. That is why we extended vaccinations and are rolling out fall services across the country. We also need to improve the flow through hospitals, as the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said, by investing in social care. I will say more about that in a moment.
Members know only too well the pressure that the pandemic put on the NHS. The number of people waiting more than 52 weeks for elective care rose from 1,468 in August 2019 to 436,000 in March 2021. In February 2022, the NHS published a delivery plan for tackling the covid-19 backlog, which set out a series of public commitments and initiatives to reduce the backlog. We met our first target by virtually eliminating waits of two years or more by July 2022—that is from a peak of 23,800 at the start of January 2022. To support that elective recovery and to cut backlogs, one of our top five priorities is to spend more than £8 billion from 2022-23 to 2024-25, in addition to the £2 billion elective recovery fund and the £700 million targeted investment fund made available last year. As well as having 4,800 more doctors and 10,900 more nurses than this time just last year, we have 89 new surgical hubs and 92 community diagnostic centres already up and running—the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) talked about the one in his local area.
As part of this elective recovery, we continue to deliver the huge investment in mental health that was set out in the long-term plan for the NHS, with £2.3 billion extra by next year, supporting an extra 2 million people to get the treatment they need each year. Taken together, that elective funding could deliver the equivalent of about 9 million more checks and procedures, and means that the NHS in England is aiming to deliver about 30% more elective activity by 2024-25 than it was delivering before the pandemic—that is a huge increase. We are aiming to end 18-month waits by April and the NHS is making good progress towards that.
Turning to general practice and primary care, I know that GPs are under huge pressure, and I am incredibly grateful to them and their teams for their hard work. We are investing an extra £1.5 billion to create an additional 50 million general practice appointments a year by 2024. We are doing that by increasing and diversifying the workforce and we are well on our way to hitting that target. In December and indeed January, there were, on average, 1.34 million general practice appointments per working day, excluding the covid vaccinations that GPs are doing. That is about a 10% increase on pre-pandemic levels. GPs are doing more than ever before and a wider range of things than ever before, and they are really working hard.
Since 2019, we have recruited more than 2,000 more doctors into general practice and more than 25,000 additional clinical staff into general practice. So we are well on the way to hitting the 26,000 extra commitment that we made ahead of schedule. They are covering a wide range of extra roles, from pharmacists to physios, mental health specialists and more. So GPs are now effectively leading a diverse team with many different specialist skills. We also had a record-breaking number starting training as GPs last year—it is up from about 2,400 a year to 4,000 a year now. As we committed to do in our plan for patients, we have amended funding rules to bolster general practice teams with new roles. We have increased the clinical services available from community pharmacies already and we are looking at how we can go further. We have introduced new digital tools and improved IT systems, where, again, we are looking to go further.
Of course, we know we need to do more. In the autumn statement, we committed to creating a recovery plan for primary care that addresses the challenges facing general practice. That plan will aim to make it easier for the public to contact their practice and easier for practices to see their patients sooner. That is due to be published in the coming weeks.
Kate Osborne
Can the Minister clarify something for me? He talks about the workforce plan. Can he tell us whether it is fully funded and whether it includes social care?
Neil O’Brien
It will be about both what is needed over time—some of the time horizons might be longer—and what we are going to do about it.
Let me complete the thought about primary care—
Neil O’Brien
I want to make a bit of progress. I am sorry, but I will perhaps come back to the hon. Lady in a bit.
Let me complete the thought on primary care. We will also be saying more about dentistry, which was an issue raised by the hon. Member for Bolton South East. She mentioned some of the reforms that we made. We are trying to make dental practice more attractive. We started reforming the contract and creating more unit of dental activity bands to better reflect the fair cost of NHS work and so incentivise it. We have introduced the minimum UDA value to help where it is particularly low. We are letting dentists deliver 110% of their contracted UDAs to encourage more activity. We have changed the law to make it easier for overseas dentists to do NHS work here, which someone mentioned earlier. Plans are advancing for centres for dental development in Ipswich and places such as Cumbria. But there is much more to do, as the hon. Lady said, and we will be saying more about that soon.
On adult social care, we are taking decisive action, with record investment, making available up to £7.5 billion over the next two years to support adult social care and discharge. That historic funding boost—that record investment in adult social care—will put the system on a much stronger financial footing and help local authorities to address pressures in the sector.