Health Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Sureena Brackenridge and Gregory Stafford

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sureena Brackenridge (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

Q On that point, Dr Dash, what would you say to concerns that have been raised with me by Healthwatch Wolverhampton that patients and service users will be reluctant to raise concerns from within the system? How will your recommendations help with that?

Dr Dash: I think that we do need to recognise that. I hear that as well and experience it myself; lots of people are often reluctant to come forward, and they think, “If this is my GP, how is this information going to be treated?” That is why we need to really raise the calibre of our directors of patient experience. There are ways in which you can manage that and treat that data confidentially—in fact, you have to treat all data confidentially. There are ways in which you can support people and give them the confidence that their information will be taken seriously and treated confidentially. You can do that often through focus groups, one-to-one conversations and anonymous surveys. We are hoping to be able to do a lot more of that through the app, to link it directly to people’s care, and to give people prompts as soon as they have had an interaction: “Please feed back.” I think there are ways in which we can overcome that. Bringing this much closer to people’s care, linking it in much more to day-to-day practice and making sure that feedback goes straight back to our frontline clinicians in an anonymised way to encourage and support them to improve brings a significant benefit, and we can find a way around the concerns about confidentiality.

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

Q I should declare that I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on patient safety. Apologies, Dr Dash, I have questioned you on this many times, but I am going to continue to do so. When the King’s Fund, the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation were in front of the Health and Social Care Committee and they talked about bringing HSSIB into the CQC, all three of them said very clearly: “Don’t do it.”. In fact, I can find almost nobody apart from you and the Department who thinks that moving HSSIB into the CQC is a good idea. Does that give you any pause for thought about whether you are recommending the right thing?

More specifically, if, as you said to the Health and Social Care Committee, the safe space element would be retained and HSSIB would operate as an independent organisation, how can you square the fact that it would remain independent and yet be part of the CQC? If it does remain independent, what is the need to bring it into the CQC?

Dr Dash: The point of bringing it into the CQC, as I said before, is that we are trying to simplify this landscape. There are so many different organisations continually commenting and doing reviews—often replicating the same reviews that other people have done. The concern is that it is distracting rather than enabling. The hope that I had when I made the recommendation, and still have now, is that by bringing HSSIB into the CQC, you can align the work of the two.

For example, if the CQC is going round the country and spotting a particular problem with the way in which anaesthesia is being given or with managing patients post-surgery, the CQC could then say to HSSIB—that team of people with specific expertise—“Can you go in and take a look at this? Can you do a detailed focus review of this particular area of care that we are spotting through our visits and which seems to be a particular challenge?” It is that bit about enabling the CQC to identify a problem and then asking HSSIB to review it in detail, and HSSIB bringing its expertise in investigations into the CQC to enable the CQC to go deeper and then come back to the NHS with particular areas, but also to supplement the work of the NHS.

I would like to point out that since HSSIB was established, the NHS has established its own much more rigorous, much more robust investigatory teams and processes. Of course, I am not saying that they are perfect—we can all see that—but I encourage all colleagues here today to look at the work they are doing, the specific areas they are reviewing, the outputs of those reviews and the ways in which those are leading to improving care. That feels to me to be a much more systematic way of addressing the concerns of patients, families and staff in the place where those concerns happen, having mechanisms to escalate those through the NHS so you can bring them to regions—some investigations get done at the NHS England level—and having the CQC as an independent body that can separately review and spot if there are problems but also ensure that those investigations within the NHS are happening well.

Health Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Sureena Brackenridge and Gregory Stafford

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sureena Brackenridge]

Q Constituents have raised issues with me about when elderly patients or patients with dementia, in particular, come to discharge and the transfer of care, because of the lack of effective data and information sharing. To what extent do the provisions in the Bill on the single patient record allow data to be shared with social care providers? I will ask Councillor Wright to start off.

Councillor Wright: At the LGA, we are arguing for a single person record, so that we have a single patient record that brings in social care providers, or at least the local authorities’ social care statutory provision, too. Someone discharged into the community would therefore still have access to records and know what was going on, while others would know what has happened to that person and what they need. Yes, we agree: we hope that a single patient record would make things as smooth as possible from hospital discharge to home and would help when someone comes into hospital, so that the clinicians have a better idea of what the patient’s quality of life was like, what treatments they were on, and so on. We are definitely in support of the single patient record for that, and we would like it to become a single person record.

Sally Burlington: We are supportive as well. The Bill itself is unlikely to solve all the problems in this space. A huge number of practical cultural system problems exist in data sharing, so the regulations that follow the Bill will be important to enable that to work for social care providers and commissioners. It is worth noting that there are thousands of social care providers, so the implementation of the Bill and subsequent regulations will be important. We are keen to ensure that any approaches are co-produced with the social care sector, as well as the NHS. It will be a lot of thinking, a lot of planning and a lot of hard work to get it right, and social care providers will need lots of notice to upgrade their systems in the right, consistent way to enable them to speak to each other, if we are to see the vision of the single person record delivered. I guess it would also be helpful to think about the role of carers as we move into that space, because we know from covid that data sharing among carers was one of the issues that came up.

[Gregory Stafford]

Q Ms Higson, given that you are a director of transformation, and that this is, in a wider sense, a transformation of the NHS, if you had the money, resources and political capital that the current Government have, would you do this or would you do something else?

Maria Higson: Any time we go through an NHS reorganisation, it is distracting—that is the reality of such situations. It is unfortunate that, over the past 15 months, this has been a large distraction for people who are genuinely trying to deliver the three shifts—prevention, digital and neighbourhoods. It is true that it has been a distraction. I am not sure that this Committee is the right space to go into these, as I am aware that we are here to discuss the Bill, but there are probably opportunities to go further on some elements, which may help us in future.