Cancer Patient Experience

Debate between Robin Walker and James Clappison

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clappison]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and some of the matters I will turn to in due course underline its strength. May I apologise to hon. Members? I mentioned NHS England, because that is what the survey covers, but I will turn to the situation in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland in due course. I am delighted that so many Members from Northern Ireland are here this morning.

The next issue is financial support. Cancer patients and their families obviously need financial support, just as everybody else does. Although significant progress has been made since the first cancer patient survey in 2010, almost half of patients who would have liked information about how to get financial help or benefits still do not receive it.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this hugely important debate. He mentioned the importance of financial advice and support, but does he agree that service design is also important? I came across a case of one constituent, David Wilson, who, while undergoing chemotherapy, received 270 different pieces of paper from our city council in just one month—August this year. It is vital that we design services so that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, local councils and the Department for Work and Pensions work together to make life for patients easier and simpler and to ensure that they understand the financial entitlements.

[Mr Clappison]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point that I am sure the Minister will want to address. The last thing that somebody coping with the treatments and everything else wants is to be bombarded with different pieces of information and requests from central or local government bodies, which could do something much more coherent and easy to understand if they streamlined their services.

I would like to address relational care, which the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) raised in his intervention. It covers matters such as communication, trust in nurses and being treated with respect, all of which are important for cancer patients. There is still room for improvement, according to the findings of the most recent survey. For example, 42% of respondents said that not all doctors and nurses asked what name patients preferred to be called by, which can be important to older people. It is a question of finding the right amount of kindness. Our clinicians—nurses and doctors—are marvellous, but that did emerge from the patient survey. Kindness can make a great difference to people in that situation.

Macmillan Cancer Support’s report showed that patient experience across the NHS is still not regarded as having equal importance as clinical effectiveness and patient safety. The Government’s decision to make patient experience one of the five domains against which the health service will be held to account should be warmly welcomed. It is clear, however, that a lot of effort needs to be put into the institutional framework to reinforce that priority.

The NHS mandate and outcomes framework needs a stronger focus on improving relational care. Hospital boards need to take a lead on prioritising patient care; a recent survey showed that its importance to different hospital boards varies considerably, which is clearly wrong, because all hospital boards should take it seriously. Commissioners of cancer services have a vital role to play, as does the chief inspector of hospitals. All such bodies need to reinforce the need for relational care and kindness in dealing with cancer patients.