Mental Health

Debate between Robert Buckland and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Thursday 14th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I am not sure that I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I agree with him that people often enter the system at a time of crisis and experience a single episode, but others who experience episodes will get better. For years they may have no problems at all. The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but I can tell him on the basis of the experience of constituents and family members that it is possible to go in and out of the system. One of the hardest things for people to accept when they are diagnosed with a mental health condition is that they will be on drugs for years and years. That is often difficult for people to admit, particularly when they are striking up a new relationship or working for a new employer. I think that that is why people want to have a voice in the way in which they are treated.

According to Mind, people are three times as likely to be satisfied with their treatment if they are presented with a choice of treatments, and failure to stay on medication is the main cause of relapses, when people often have to re-enter the system at a time of crisis. There is a need to work with and trust health professionals. According to a recent study by the university of Kent,

“Low levels of trust between mental health patients and professionals can lead to poor communication which generates negative outcomes for patients, including a further undermining of trust”,

and

“trust can play a significant role in facilitating service users’ initial and ongoing engagement with services, the openness of their communication, and the level of co-operation with, and outcomes from, treatment or medication.”

In 2009, a mental heath in-patient survey by the Care Quality Commission revealed that in some mental health trusts as few as 40% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia felt that they were involved as much as they wanted to be in decisions about their care and treatment. I am no health professional—I hope that some Members who are health professionals will speak later this afternoon—but what people have said to me suggests that medication is not always the answer, at least in the long term. Research by Platform 51 has found that a quarter of women have been on anti-depressants for 10 years or more, that half of women on anti-depressants were not offered alternatives at the time of prescription, and that a quarter of women on antidepressants have waited a year or more for a review of their medication

I welcome the Government’s investment of £400 million in treatments under the improving access to psychological therapies programme. I should add, to be fair, that that builds on announcements made by the last Government. I also commend the report by the Centre for Social Justice on talking therapies, which calls for a broadening of therapies. Every patient is different, and patients will respond differently to different medications and therapies. Mental health patients must have real choice, and I think that Any Qualified Provider and Payment by Results must be extended to them in the way in which they are being extended to patients with physical health conditions. We must also ensure that patients’ voices are heard within the management structures of both clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards, whose job it is to hold services to account for the care that they are giving.

I expect that Members will refer to integrated care: the need for all services to work together. Poor mental health has an impact on every area of Government policy: health care, benefits, housing and debt, social exclusion, business and employment, criminal justice and education, to name but a few. One person with a mental health condition may need help from many different agencies, but too often care is not joined up, and each agency deals with its own bit and passes the person on. Sometimes there is no follow-up, and the person is lost in the system.

In a 2011 survey, 45% of people contacted by Mind said that they had been given eight or more assessments by different agencies in a single year. YoungMinds, which campaigns on behalf of children and young people with mental health conditions, has called for one worker to be allotted to each child needing support for a mental health condition, so that children can avoid multiple assessments and need not re-tell their story each time they see a new person in the system. However, there must be a clear care pathway, whatever the point at which access is gained to the mental health system.

The other thing patients are calling for is the ability to self-refer. We need to do all we can to prevent people from reaching crisis point, and often it is patients themselves who are best able to tell when they are about to reach that point. My West Leicestershire clinical commissioning group is developing an acute care pathway in partnership with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. It plans to replace the many and varied access routes to secondary care and mental health services with a single access point, in order to provide speedy access at times of greatest need. That move has come out of both patient and GP feedback.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, and I am particularly interested in the proposed single access point for services. That could be useful not only for acute services, but for non-acute services and well-being provision. Does my hon. Friend agree that well-being provision is an important part of mental health provision?

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall talk about well-being shortly. We often talk about these subjects in very negative ways. If we all talk about our mental well-being, and are regularly asked about it when we see our GPs, that will help a lot to de-stigmatise mental health issues.

I want to touch briefly on secondary care. One of the Sunday Express campaign demands is that all hospitals should be therapeutic environments where people with mental health problems feel safe and are treated with respect and have someone to talk to. In a debate in this House last November, I mentioned patients who abscond from secondary care units, and in particular the tragic case of my constituent Kirsty Brookes, who was able to escape from a unit in Leicester and subsequently hanged herself. I am sure the Minister will remember that debate, and our discussion of the definition of absconding.

The Care Quality Commission has published its first report on absconding levels, and I welcome that, but the picture in respect of absconding and escape numbers is still unclear. The numbers provided in this first CQC report need to be broken down further, therefore, but the report showed that in the year in question—2009-10, I think—there were 4,321 incidents of absence without leave from secondary care. Some of them were, of course, far more serious than others; some will have involved a person missing a bus on the way back to the unit, while others might have ended in tragic circumstances. I make this point not to beat up on secondary care providers and health providers generally, but we must know the scale of a problem before we can begin to tackle it.

The impact of the voluntary and community sector on mental health must not be forgotten either, and I hope Members will talk about that. The sector offers vital support, and it must be part of the commissioning landscape.

Anonymity (Arrested Persons) Bill

Debate between Robert Buckland and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Friday 4th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Buckland]

That point is powerfully made. I have said many times, in my constituency and here, that we are in danger of demonising the younger generation. We have all, as Members of Parliament, had some encouraging experiences when we meet groups of young people in our constituencies. I find them to be engaged, alive to the issues that confront them as youngsters, keen to participate in their communities and interested in the world about them. In a way, despite our concerns about some aspects of the syllabus and the direction of education, they are much better prepared for the vicissitudes of life than perhaps people of my generation and previous generations were.

[Nicky Morgan]

To counterbalance that and bring us back to the Bill, there was a case a few years ago of a young man who was accused of rape. During freshers’ week at university, an unfortunate incident occurred with a young lady, and it was unclear whether consent had been given. The charge was not proven, but—to revert to the point about young people—the young man’s life was ruined because he had been named. He was terrified about his future—his employment prospects, the misery of the next few years of university and so on. The Bill may particularly benefit young people against whom charges are not proven.

[Mr Buckland]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. As I said earlier, people can be haunted by internet stories about—worse than a charge that is not proven—an innocent person, against whom false allegations, which did not pass the test of the burden of proof, are made. We must hold on to our principles and remember that young people have their lives before them.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) about demonising young people, but, sadly, as with adults, there is a majority of good young people and a minority of bad apples. I therefore make no apology for a robust approach to the miscreants in our communities, some of whom are, sadly, young people, who cause genuine misery to some of my residents, and those in constituencies throughout the country. It is perhaps a little too glib to say that we should not publicise the names of young people who are given ASBOs. I mentioned the difficulty with interim ASBOs, but the presumption should be in favour of publication.