Tees Valley Spinal Unit

Paul Burstow Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Paul Burstow)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) on raising this important set of issues. The subject is close to my heart as well, as a result of my previous experiences as a Back Bencher raising similar issues about how we can deal with chronic back pain and ensure that pain is not an afterthought and the forgotten issue in the NHS, given how much it can blight the lives of so many people. Before saying a little more about that, I want to do what the hon. Gentleman asked me to do at the end of his remarks and pay tribute to both the excellent work the NHS staff working in his area do, sometimes under trying circumstances, and the work Victoria and the other people he mentioned do through their contribution as volunteers and supporters of other patients.

The hon. Gentleman vividly described his own experiences, and in doing so he has helped to turn a spotlight on these important issues. We must keep in mind the excellent care and consideration he received—and has rightly praised so highly—from Mr Krishna and that team’s other specialists. Their work has made a difference to his life, as well as to the lives of many of his constituents and many other people. This is a clear example of the NHS at its best, and I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to all concerned.

Often it is a patient asking how they can get involved that provides the spark that leads to the sort of voluntary activity the hon. Gentleman has described. I certainly have no difficulty in paying tribute to Victoria for asking that question of Mr Krishna, which became the spark that has ignited so much good work since.

I am aware of the hon. Gentleman’s ongoing engagement with the group since his surgery in 2008. His remarks again highlighted the value of patients who have finally found relief after long-term chronic back pain having the opportunity to talk to others who are still going through the misery of their condition, as that can reassure people about what can be done. The support group’s work shows the extraordinary value of having the voluntary sector and volunteers working within our NHS. He asked what we can do to strengthen that approach and replicate the idea further. The first question at last week’s Health questions was about what we can do better to support volunteering in the NHS. I said then, and I repeat now, that we are working closely with the association of hospital volunteer co-ordinators to make sure that NHS boards have the information they need to make the right decisions about the investments they need to make to support voluntary organisations. These may be small investments, such as providing a bit of time or a room where people can provide the valuable emotional and other support that he describes. That approach is very much at the heart of the vision in our report on volunteering in the NHS. One way we can see that go further is by ensuring that local NHS organisations sign up to the compact agreements on the voluntary sector, so that they are fully engaging with their local voluntary and community sector and making full use of that way forward.

I understand that the Tees Valley spinal support group holds quarterly meetings and I am told that they are attended by hundreds of people, which, again, underscores how important these groups can be. Perhaps most important is the fact that charity volunteers who have received spinal surgery are available to talk about these issues, as that can be hugely reassuring. There is also enormous value in developing this whole area of hospital volunteer schemes. As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, this support group provides an excellent example, and I will want to use it to illustrate the benefits of such approaches. That is why I am keen to make sure that these volunteering opportunities go further.

I wish to reflect a little further on some of the points that the hon. Gentleman made, and there is broad agreement about many of them. He rightly highlighted the huge impact that back pain can have on people’s lives, saying that we can do better on treating and preventing it. This is a serious issue for the NHS, for the people affected and for the economy and our society as a whole, and it is not just about the most extreme cases where surgery proves necessary. He rightly says that surgery is no silver bullet, but when one rehearses the statistics, as he did, one finds that in the number of working days lost to illness, musculoskeletal conditions come second only to mental health problems, with a price tag for the economy of £5.3 billion a year. That occurs through lost work days, poor productivity and, in the most serious cases, people being shut out of work altogether and facing a lifetime of incapacity and difficulty.

In the shadow of the statistics that the hon. Gentleman has rehearsed there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have to cope with chronic back pain for many years. As he has said, some of these people are not given the opportunities they need to get the right support and the right treatment at the right time, so he was right to talk about the impact on the individual and about his personal experience, but there is also an impact on families, on relationships, on mental health and on a person’s well-being. For me, that points to the fact that when we think about health and well-being, we need to think bigger. He talked about holistic services that have an impact on poor health and tackle health conditions. That is very much part of what we are trying to achieve through some of the reforms to which he referred, so that improving mental health outcomes or issues to do with pain, for example, becomes not just about the Department of Health or the NHS but about what the Government, employers and many other organisations can do together. Occupational health is a key component of that.

I hope we can agree on some of the elements of the vision of what a society that actively promotes health and well-being looks like. Local communities, councils, the NHS and the voluntary sector, which has extraordinary power, should work together to begin to make a difference to the health and well-being of local people, and everything in the health system should point towards prevention. We should be able to say that the NHS is as good at preventing poor health as it is at treating it.

Let me say something about the need to ensure the integrated package of care mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. He listed some numbers and I would like to write to him about the numbers of spinal surgeons and so on, to give him a bit more detail on our thinking about how we can develop the NHS in respect of musculoskeletal conditions. There is a good story to tell and I want to set that out in more detail for him.

I also want to answer the hon. Gentleman’s important question about how reforms will support improvements in surgery services. In our view, the Health and Social Care Bill creates a number of the tools that will support continuous quality improvement in the service. The outcomes frameworks published for the NHS on social care and public health provide a greater opportunity for clarity and accountability and have been widely welcomed across the clinical community.

Let me answer the hon. Gentleman’s questions about what reform can do. Reform must allow much greater transparency so that we can see differences and variations in the service in different parts of the country. The publication of the health atlas is already driving commissioners to benchmark themselves against the best in the NHS. The use of tariffs will drive best practice in the services, too, and front-line staff will be empowered to use the clinical evidence—they know that this is the best practice—to deliver and commission the best possible services for their populations.

I thank the hon. Gentleman again for bringing this matter to the House tonight. He was right to want to praise the work of the spinal support group and the valuable contribution it makes to the lives of so many people in his community. I also praise the professionalism of the NHS staff who treated him and who treat his constituents. I am pleased to have the opportunity to put those remarks on the record and to endorse and underscore what he said.

Question put and agreed to.