Allied Health Professionals

Debate between Paulette Hamilton and Jen Craft

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That his House has considered the contribution of allied health professionals.

I am very grateful to be able to introduce this debate today, and I would like to begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar) on her hard work in securing it.

Allied health professionals, such as occupational therapists, physiotherapists, dieticians, music therapists and so many more, are a vital part of our NHS. They will be crucial to delivering the three shifts in healthcare—in particular, treatment to prevention and hospital to community—that the Secretary of State set out as key to delivering the 10-year health plan and securing the future of the NHS for generations to come. They help people to recover from illness or injury, prevent the onset and development of conditions such as frailty, help people to adjust to new or existing realities of disability, and are vital in enabling and empowering people to take control of their health.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley brings considerable professional experience to this place as a trained physiotherapist. I believe she plans to speak to the importance of those professionals to adult healthcare—indeed, she is best placed to do so—so I will focus primarily on the vital role of allied health professionals in paediatric care.

As a parent with experience of paediatric allied health professionals, I can speak to their completely invaluable contribution to a child’s wellbeing. They not only support the child who is the patient in their care, but the entire family. It can be a real lifeline to have a trusted professional helping you to come to terms with your child’s diagnosis, or perhaps with a shift in reality. I also know, from friends and constituents who have children living with life-limiting conditions, that allied health professionals such as music therapists and drama therapists can be the lifeline that provides moments of joy, as well as extending the lifespan and the time that people get to spend with their children who have very severe and limiting conditions.

I want to put on record that paediatric allied health professionals in particular are not just a “nice to have” or an add-on to the health profession. It is quite easy to overlook the contribution and impact that people such as music therapists—I will give an excellent example—can have on a child’s life. If Members can imagine a child who is non-verbal and potentially has behavioural and communication difficulties and no real form of self-expression, an art therapist, a music therapist or a drama therapist can help to unlock something that traditional healthcare workers perhaps cannot. They can make a real difference to how that child’s care progresses and how their life chances pan out.

Paediatric allied health professionals are also able to reduce the pressure and the intensity on the acute system. Excellent work has been done with music therapists, art therapists and play therapists, who do not currently come under the auspices of allied health professionals but perhaps one day may do, to reduce sometimes even the need for general anaesthetic, MRI scans or CT scans for particular children with complex needs, as they help them to navigate their pathway through the system.

They are also crucial in helping children who perhaps have had a traumatic early start to life to engage with the healthcare system and the wider healthcare system at large. Children who are recovering from, or going through treatment for, cancer or other severe diseases and illnesses, are supported by these professionals to come to terms and to grips with what they are going through and to express themselves. Professions such as occupational therapists, physiotherapists, and speech and language therapists play a vital role in childhood, enabling children who have an additional need in those areas to be able to perform at the same level as their peers and to be the best version of themselves.

The Health and Social Care Committee, of which I am a member, has taken considerable evidence on the crisis in the allied healthcare professions, in particular in paediatrics and early years. We have discussed at length with various organisations such as the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, Speech and Language UK, the Disabled Children’s Partnership and Contact the impact this is having on children, on families and on the professionals themselves.

There are currently 77,500 children who have been on community waiting lists—quite often the way that people access allied health professional care—for over a year.

[Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some fantastic points, especially those highlighting the findings of the Health and Social Care Committee. Allied health professionals are absolutely vital to what we do in the health service. As with health visitors, their numbers seem to be going down at the moment, and nothing is really being done to build them back up. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to build the numbers of allied health professionals back up?

[Jen Craft]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She brings a breadth of experience to this place on these issues, both as a member of the Health and Social Care Committee and as a registered nurse. I agree that we do need to take urgent action to rebuild the numbers of allied health professionals and health visitors. The Committee has heard that there has been a halving of the number of health visitors in the past 10 years, which has had an almost catastrophic impact on their ability to deliver the vital role that they play in identifying early need in childhood, particularly in the early years, supporting families where there is an additional need for support and signposting people to other mechanisms, such as Best Start family hubs, to ensure there is that proportionate universalism that is so key to ensuring that those who need help get it in a timely way. I very much agree with my hon. Friend that urgent action needs to be taken to address this, which we will hopefully see in the upcoming NHS workforce plan.

That ties into my earlier point. There are 77,500 children and young people who have been on a community care waiting list for more than a year in England, which is a sixfold rise since the start of 2023. For comparison, only around 1% of adults wait for more than a year for community care, compared with around 25% of children. Thinking about equity in healthcare, a year for a child could be an entire lifetime, which is not the case for an adult.

We also know that there is a really rapid development window in the early years, particularly in the first 1,001 days, where we have the ability to make an impact on the life chances of a child, when all that quick-fire development is happening mentally, physically, socially and emotionally. It is absolutely crucial to get in at the onset and arrest conditions before they become more serious and make a real impact on the life chances of a child through to schooling, employment and beyond.

However, there is a crisis across the allied health professions, particularly in early years. I want to highlight a few areas where this is really bearing fruit. According to the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, four fifths of occupational therapists are unable to meet local demand. The workforce remains focused on secondary care, which limits capacity for prevention and early intervention in communities. Workforce pressure does translate into rising waiting lists; in February 2026, nearly 18,000 children and young people were waiting to see an occupational therapist. This has a huge impact on the life of a young person. Quite often occupational therapist interventions are not costly, but the inference and reference of an expert or specialist is needed to be able to direct people in how best to carry them out. The fact that 18,000 children are waiting to see an OT is really shocking. These delays will have a real impact on professionals being able to act at the very earliest opportunity to turn children’s life chances around.

Speech and language therapy is another area that is experiencing a crisis in both recruitment and retention. According to Speech and Language UK, more than 2 million children in the UK have struggled to speak or understand words and an estimated 1.3 million have a developmental language disorder. The Government must train and recruit enough speech and language therapists to ensure that the trend of a reduction in the profession is arrested. Currently, 16% of NHS speech and language therapy posts in England are vacant, and the vacancy rate for NHS speech and language therapy posts supporting people with a learning disability is even more stark, at 25%. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists reports that 96% of children’s speech and language therapy services say that recruitment is more or much more challenging than at any time in the past three years.

What that translates to is those in these crucial professions spending the vast majority of their time carrying out assessment work when things have reached a point of crisis or acute care need. They are not getting to see people and intervene at the earliest opportunity, and they are not getting to help families. That is driving the retention crisis, as professionals find themselves unable to perform the role for which they trained and about which they are, by and large, incredibly passionate. Instead, they are spending their time carrying out assessments and recommending therapeutic care that they know is very unlikely to materialise.

The real crisis in the paediatric allied healthcare professions could have a huge knock-on effect on a major part of Government policy found in the education White Paper. I know that the Minister is here to speak for the Department of Health and Social Care, but the Health and Social Care Committee has continually found that there is a real gap in the role of healthcare when it comes to education, health and care plans, and in the special educational needs and disabilities system as a whole.

The White Paper places huge demand on having “experts at hand”—a locally trained workforce who are able to provide specialist support. It names professions such as occupational therapy, physiotherapy and speech and language therapy, which fall entirely within the allied health professional workforce, which it is in the gift of the Department of Health and Social Care to provide. However, we know that these occupations are at crisis point; time and again, when we talk to our local integrated care boards, they say that they do not have the people available to fulfil that “expert at hand” role. It is such an important part of the education White Paper that if it fails, I am afraid the entire White Paper is at risk of failure. The crux of it is early and timely intervention, and support for families, school staff and children, in order to make an impact at the earliest possible opportunity. Without this workforce, it cannot and will not succeed.

I ask the Minister: what plans will there be in the upcoming workforce strategy to address the decline in paediatric allied healthcare professionals? What plans are there for training, recruitment and retention, not just to support this important part of the education White Paper, but to address the real health inequality in paediatrics? It is fair to say that the impact on children is so much worse than that on adults receiving healthcare, because they can spend such a significant chunk of their life on a waiting list.

Most importantly, what action is being taken to ensure that these professionals, particularly those in the paediatric workforce, feel valued and know that their contribution really counts towards the delivery of both the current healthcare system and the Government’s wider reform agenda? How can we ensure that the life chances of children are best improved and encouraged through the recruitment, retention and valuing of allied healthcare professionals?

First 1,000 Days of Life

Debate between Paulette Hamilton and Jen Craft

Thursday 29th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)]

On behalf of the Health and Social Care Committee, it is a pleasure to present to the House our fifth report of this Parliament, which is on the subject of the first 1,000 days of life. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this statement. We chose this subject because this period of life is crucial for long-term health, educational outcomes and life chances, and because child health in this country is in an alarmingly poor state. As the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has stated, our children have some of the poorest health outcomes in Europe. That is why this report is so important, and why it is essential that we get this right.

We know that investment in early intervention is highly cost-effective, yet we continue to see rising obesity, uneven vaccination coverage and persistent inequalities. We therefore welcome the Government’s expansion of the family hub network. However, we must be clear about the scale of the challenge those hubs are being asked to address—supporting a much broader range of children than the previous Sure Start system with fewer resources. That is why we have called on the Government to go further by ensuring access to family hubs in every community, underpinned by reliable, long-term funding. A single hub per county is simply insufficient and will leave families isolated. This must be matched by urgent action to restore the health visitor workforce, which is the backbone of early years care. Since 2015, numbers have fallen by 43%, leaving a shortfall of 5,000 posts. Caseloads remain dangerously high, sometimes exceeding 750 children. We have therefore called for a funded plan to recruit at least 1,000 additional health visitors.

The wider workforce is also critical. Health visitors are not the only key professionals involved in supporting children and their parents during that first 1,000-day period—midwives, children’s nurses, general practitioners, early years practitioners, speech and language therapists, paediatricians and others all play incredibly important roles. The Government’s forthcoming NHS 10-year workforce plan must include specific, funded targets for increasing the number of professionals working in early years roles, underpinned by updated modelling of future demand. However, we cannot focus solely on the NHS, as many of these professionals work outside it. That is why we have supported the call of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for a children’s health workforce strategy to address the staffing needs holistically.

Our report also addresses the serious decline in vaccination uptake. Vaccination is one of the most effective public health interventions, yet rates have fallen since 2012, with stark regional and ethnic disparities. It is indefensible that one child died of measles and 11 lost their lives to whooping cough in 2024. The Committee was also unimpressed by the Government’s unwillingness to revisit their vaccination strategy. The Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton), told us the strategy was “stabilising” vaccination numbers, but we need a strategy capable of reversing current trends. We have called on the Government to develop a new plan to reverse the decline and to reinstate the target of 95% coverage in the NHS planning guidance.

Finally, we need to ensure that the many agencies involved in supporting children at the start of life are all working towards the same goal and that it is easy for them to work together. Challenges in sharing data and the absence of a shared outcomes framework undermine accountability and strategic planning across local systems. We look forward to the Government’s plans to publish a shared outcomes framework in April this year, which they must use as a tool to drive better integration and joint working, including between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education.

Every child deserves the best start in life. Failing to support children and their parents properly during those first 1,000 days is short-sighted, as it merely stores up problems for the future. However, if we get it right, we will create a generation that is healthier, better educated, ultimately wealthier and, most importantly, happier. I hope that this report and its recommendations can play a part in making that happen. I commend the report to the House.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

It was a pleasure to serve under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend during our Committee’s inquiry into the first 1,000 days of life. I was particularly struck by how, at this crucial period in a child’s lifetime—for those who are not aware, the 1,000 days begins at the moment of conception and goes up until they are two years old—so many services that should basically be placing a hug around the family and around the child have instead been decimated. Those services come at a critical stage. I am grateful that the Minister for Early Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West and Mid Berkshire (Olivia Bailey), is on the Front Bench to hear the statement.

Does my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton) agree that if the Government does not grasp the scale of this challenge or accept our Committee’s recommendations—I urge them to do so in full—we run the risk of undermining some of our reforms in special educational needs and disabilities? By investing in the early years and by taking the action that that my hon. Friend has outlined—we must ensure early intervention and that we rebuild the health visitor network, so that the families who need extra support and care are identified early and can be got into the network of family hubs to receive that support—the rest of our reforms, including to the SEND system, can go ahead. Without that investment, and without the Government taking heed of what our Committee has recommended, we run the very real risk of all that work being undermined.

Health and Social Care Committee

Debate between Paulette Hamilton and Jen Craft

Thursday 16th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry, but we need to move on to the questions. Time is very short, so can we please have questions, rather than reviews of the report?

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

I very much welcome the report and the leadership that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton) has shown throughout its production. I have the honour of serving on the Health and Social Care Committee, and this is one of the standout pieces of work that we carried out while she was interim Chair.

One of the things that stood out to me as we undertook this investigation was the huge need for cultural change in maternal care, which struck me as very impactful. How can a woman at the most vulnerable point in her life feel safe receiving healthcare from a trust that has been called racist? The need for that cultural change was the key takeaway for me. Does my hon. Friend agree that, on a widespread basis across maternal services in the NHS, this change is desperately needed?

[Paulette Hamilton]

I thank my hon. Friend, who is a brilliant member of the Committee, including during the inquiry. She is absolutely right. The issue of cultural change applies to everybody. We need to look at cultural change within maternity services, not just for black women but for all women. If we are to get the improvements in maternity care that we need, we need to look at how we can develop both the cultural awareness training and, more so, people’s mindsets, because of how they think within that system.