NHS (Five Year Forward View)

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The Secretary of State confirms that he is not making any allegation of personal dishonesty against any individual. Enough: we are grateful. We will leave it there for now.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the statement. The extra funds for the NHS constitute a clear endorsement of Simon Stevens’s excellent “Five Year Forward View”. I particularly welcome the announcement of multi-year budgets and investment in patients’ ability to control their own records. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the process of creating paperless NHS hospitals will move seamlessly from primary to secondary care, and will be controlled by patients themselves?

[Mr Hunt]

The commitment to a paperless NHS is not a commitment to the creation of paperless hospitals by 2018; it is a commitment to the creation of a paperless NHS so that, with patients’ consent, information can flow seamlessly between different parts of the system. The interface between primary care and secondary care, and social care, is a very important part of that process.