Health and Social Care

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the health and social care debate on the Queen’s Speech, which seems to have been rather wide-ranging.

I pay tribute to the Government for introducing the Care Bill. It shows that they have listened to the concerns of many people. I support the proposals for three main reasons. First, the Bill will put people in control of their care and give them greater choice. Secondly, it will simplify the system and processes to provide the freedom and flexibility that local authorities and social workers need to innovate and achieve better results. Thirdly, it will provide people with a better understanding of what is on offer, help them to plan for the future, and ensure that they know where to go for help when they need it.

The Care Bill is essential to the modernisation of adult care and support in England. One purpose of the Bill is to set out clearly what support people can expect from the Government and what action the Government will take to help them to plan, prepare and make informed choices about their care. I support the well-being principle as an underlying principle for care and the support for carers. However, I urge colleagues in the Department of Health to monitor the implementation of the Bill carefully to ensure that local authorities are completely clear about their responsibilities.

I have a constituent who suffers from an acquired brain injury. His parents sought assistance from the adult care services department of their local authority, Derby city council, and from the primary care trust. Both organisations say that it is the other’s responsibility. That is causing great distress and frustration to my constituent’s elderly parents who are caring for him and his six-year-old child. I have written to both parties, as well as to Ministers in the Department of Health, and so far both have repeatedly refused to take responsibility.

I have also written to Health Ministers about another constituency case. A constituent of mine is suffering from severe chronic pancreatitis and has been told he needs to undergo a pancreatectomy and an islet cell transplant. However, as the national specialised commissioning group has not issued confirmation of funding for an islet cell laboratory in my region, my constituent is left suffering in extreme pain unnecessarily. I would like to see movement on the two cases that I have raised with the Department of Health.

Over the past three years, I have also raised constituency casework concerning the cancer drugs fund, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister who set up that initiative. Some 23,000 cancer patients in England have benefited from the additional £650 million provided by the Government to fund cancer drugs.

[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

Like my hon. Friend, I welcome the cancer drugs fund, which I think is important. About 150 of my constituents will die from cancer this year—about 100,000 people a year. Currently, 15% of 15-year-olds are regular smokers. Does my hon. Friend feel, as I do, that we should have standardised plain packaging of cigarettes to discourage the take-up of smoking and the cancer that results from it?

[Pauline Latham]

I certainly do, and having watched my mother die from lung cancer, I passionately believe in anything that will stop people smoking. It is not a pretty sight, and I would do anything to stop young people in particular taking up the drug of smoking. That is important.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Our hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) mentioned the risk from counterfeit tobacco, which is very serious indeed. There are two risks: first that the substance will be less pure than commercial tobacco; and secondly that the Treasury will lose a tremendous amount of money as the result of trafficking.

[Pauline Latham]

There is already counterfeit tobacco, so I do not see that it would make much difference. Those who are drawn to smoking do not go over and buy counterfeit goods; they start off in this country—often under age—by buying cigarettes over the counter. If we can stop that, I passionately believe we should do so, and I am disappointed that that measure was not in the Queen’s Speech.

The cancer drugs fund is a force for good, but in my constituency of Mid Derbyshire, which was covered by the east midlands cancer drugs fund, I have had constituents who were unable to access cancer drug treatment that was available from other CDFs. In one case, if my constituent had lived just 40 minutes down the road in Burton upon Trent in the west midlands, that CDF would have paid for her treatment. She paid more than £60,000 of her own money, but since I first raised the issue she has sadly died. The reforms introduced by the Government from 1 April this year and the establishment of the national CDF will end the unfair system of the postcode lottery. Under treatments now offered by the new NHS Commissioning Board, if my constituent were alive today, she would have access to that treatment.

[Hugh Bayley]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Pauline Latham]

I am running short of time; I am sorry but I must make progress.

I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Benches to look again at this matter because the Government have set up the CDF to ensure that people get access to the life-saving cancer treatment they need. I have constituents who need access to a form of radiotherapy called “SIR-Spheres”, which is used where bowel cancer has spread to the liver. That treatment is not now available anywhere in the NHS—people can pay for it, of course—although it was previously available in most CDF areas, although not the east midlands. Will the Minister look again at the issue and meet me and my constituents’ hospital consultant, Dr Jamie Mills, to see whether we can make progress?

I recently started working with the British Heart Foundation on sudden adult death syndrome after I was contacted by two constituents whose son, Sam, died suddenly as a result of cardiac arrest. He was 19 years old. SADS claims the lives of at least 12 young people such as Sam every week, but many of those fatalities are completely preventable. I knew a young man in his 20s who died in the middle of his round in a dressage competition. Like Sam, he was a very fit young man. All such young deaths are devastating for everyone concerned, family and friends alike.

The seconds and minutes after someone has a cardiac arrest are vital to ensuring their survival. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation should be used immediately until a defibrillator can be located. If those activities are used together, the potential for survival is immediately increased. In fact, here in the UK, we currently have only a 20% survival rate—that figure is for all cardiac arrests, not just cardiac arrests among young people—but in Seattle, where there is mandatory CPR education in secondary schools, the survival rate has increased to 54%. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Skills in the Department for Education is no longer in the Chamber—he was here a few minutes ago. My suggestion is that, if we roll out a schools programme, we could increase survival rates, as more children are trained to undertake CPR and to follow-up with defibrillators.

I am deeply concerned about those figures. I should like to highlight the pressing need for the availability of life-saving equipment and skills in our schools. In the first instance, will the Department of Health work with local authorities through health and wellbeing boards to urge them to consider providing funding to install automated external defibrillators in all schools and other local authority facilities? AEDs are very simple to use, even for the untrained layperson. Detailed instructions on how they are to be deployed are delivered through a set of simple audio and visual commands. The machines are programmed to administer an electrical shock only if the patient’s condition requires it. In order to prevent mortality as a result of SADS, it is essential that those easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive devices are made available in schools.

Further to the availability of AEDs, it is also extremely important that, through citizenship lessons, children of school age are aware of, and able to administer, life-saving treatment such as CPR. Such a scheme would cost local authorities very little, and ultimately has the potential to save many lives every year. Organisations such as St John Ambulance would be able to go to schools to train students and teachers so that they are able to undertake such treatment.

In addition, I should like to point out to hon. Members that the British Heart Foundation provides grants to schools for defibrillators. Many schools are not aware of that. Perhaps MPs on both sides of the House could make schools in our constituencies aware of the grant. I look forward to working with the Department of Health on the issues that I have raised about the cancer drugs fund and on defibrillators.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the thoughtful speech of the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham).

I congratulate the Government on their fine display of unity on the Queen’s Speech. In all my years in the Whips Office, I cannot recall seeing anything quite like it. In the early days of the Government, the ambition was simple: wipe out the deficit in a single Parliament, set debt on a downward path and restore health to the economy. Hon. Members were to judge success by how the credit ratings agencies maintained the triple A rating. Simple! The Government now claim that their ambition is to cut the deficit by a third, but almost everyone else believes it is more likely to be cut by only a quarter. That is our lot for the rest of the Parliament. Debt is rising, not falling, and triple A credit ratings are but a distant memory.

After the costs in administrative chaos caused by the top-down reorganisation of the health service, which the Prime Minister promised would not happen, the Government are turning their hand to social care. They are right to do so, at least in the sense that social care is a time bomb that desperately needs tackling. My most recent survey of constituents in Selly Oak shows that 73% of them consider care to be an issue of extreme importance, and only 42% think that the quality of care received by someone close to them is satisfactory.

People are struggling—people such as Mrs Hanslow, who cares for her 96-year-old father. She asks only for the odd break, and in the past she has arranged that by phoning a social worker. When she tried that this February, she discovered that the social worker had left. The office said that somebody would phone her back, but nobody did. She phoned again and was told that she needed to make a fresh application; apparently, files and arrangements leave with the social workers these days.

After several abortive attempts, Mrs Hanslow spoke to a nice lady called Wendy, who said that she would sort the situation out. Then a Mrs Collins rang saying that she was arranging for a social worker to come. But guess what? Mrs Hanslow waited in all day and no one came. Frustrated, she rang again and spoke to a Jackie, who could find no record of her application or complaint but said that someone would ring her back. No one rang, so Mrs Hanslow phoned again. This time, people at the office were not so nice. Mrs Hanslow was told that nothing had been reported because the social worker was out of the office.

[Pauline Latham]

What the hon. Gentleman is describing is the fault of the local authority, not the Government. The local authority is responsible for social workers, not the Government.