NHS and Social Care Funding

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Lord Evans of Rainow

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whitford]

The whole prevention and public health message is crucial, and that is one of our other challenges. I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for no longer talking about a figure of £10 billion, because the increase in the Department of Health’s budget is actually £4.5 billion. Part of that relates to the reduction in public health funding, just at a time when we need to move it on to a totally different scale. Whether that is children or, indeed, adults doing the daily mile—perhaps we should run up to Trafalgar Square and back every lunchtime, which I am sure would do us all a power of good—we need to invest in such preventive measures. One of my points is that when we end up desperate—patching up how the NHS runs, or dealing with illnesses we did not bother to prevent—we always end up spending more money.

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Lady knows how much I respect her and what she says. As the chairman of the all-party group on running, I endorse the daily mile and encourage all adults to do it. Park runs, which happen across the nation, are a good example. There is huge expertise in Scotland, so can NHS England learn from Scotland? What is best practice, and will she give us some examples of it in hospitals and hospital trusts in Scotland that we can take away and learn from?

[Dr Whitford]

The whole issue comes down to sustainability, which is obviously the idea behind the sustainability and transformation plans. As those who have heard me speak about STPs will know, I support the idea in principle. The idea is to go back to place-based planning on an integrated basis for a community. The difference in Scotland is that we have focused on integration. We got rid of hospital trusts in 2004, and we got rid of primary care trusts in the late 2000s—in 2009 or 2010. Since April 2014, we have set up integration joint boards, where a bag of money from the NHS and a bag of money from the local authority are put on the table and a group sit around it and work out the best way to deal with the interface and to support social care. Anyone in the Chamber or elsewhere with family members who have been stuck in hospital will know that people get into a bickering situation: Mrs Bloggs is in a bed so the local authority is not interested, because she is safe there, and the local authority is instead busy with Mrs Smith, who has fallen off a ladder trying to put up her curtains and who is not considered safe because she is leaving the gas on. Such boards get rid of all that perverse obstruction.