NHS Dentistry: Recovery and Reform
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Victoria Atkins
The advice and guidance to dentists will be going out today, while the new patient premium that I have told the House about will come in from March—it is weeks away.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for an excellent statement and an excellent plan. It is exactly what patients in Suffolk have been waiting to hear—the rural payment, the bonus there and the mobile service. I am conscious that many dentists have chosen not to have more patients, and they might blame the contract—this, that or the other. That is why I welcome her plan about potentially tying in graduates to the NHS. My hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) has already referred to the General Dental Council, which, in my view, has not taken full advantage of the regulations that came into force last March. Will the Secretary of State also look at the NHS’s own rules that further restrict the rapid supply of dentists into the NHS for our constituents?
Victoria Atkins
I thank my right hon. Friend for all the work she did on dentistry in the Department. I am conscious that many people have contributed to this plan; I am grateful to her and others. Again, I hear the observations on the General Dental Council, and will ensure that the GDC hears them as well. That is a fair challenge to the NHS. Colleagues will see that the plan is co-signed by NHS England, which shares our ambition to deliver those 2.5 million more appointments and set up the future of NHS dentistry for our country.
Pharmacy First
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Dame Andrea Leadsom
Oh, was it 8.31? I thank the Secretary of State. When will the services be available? I should think that many more are taking place already.
I am afraid that, while welcoming this, the hon. Lady is being a little pusillanimous with her praise. A lot of her suggestions, as she will know, are simply not true: already, well over 2,000 new GPs and tens of thousands of nurses are working in our NHS. Many thousands of additional practice staff are working in GP practices, and, as she will know, our brilliant GPs have made 50 million more appointments available each year ahead of the target in our manifesto. Good on them. They are doing an amazing job, and Pharmacy First will ease the ever-increasing burden on them.
The hon. Lady talks about technology. I am pleased to tell her that ensuring that the technology was in place was key in deciding when we could go live. There is a very short window in which some systems will have elements of manual intervention, but only for a few weeks. The whole system will be fully automated and will provide the ability to inquire into GP records and to swap advice, which is important for pharmacists to deliver the excellent service that they are already delivering.
Finally, the hon. Lady will know that community pharmacists have for some time now been delivering blood pressure checks, which in some cases are truly lifesaving. This is amazing patient access and patient convenience. The Labour party should, for once, simply praise it and be glad that the Government have stuck to our plan and got on with it.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
I am so pleased to hear today’s announcement that we are delivering. It was one of the key things in our plan for patients that I wanted to ensure happened. In particular, many Members of this House, current and past, have had infections and, as a consequence of not dealing with them, have ended up in hospital. This is the sort of sensible approach that, frankly, met some resistance during my time in the Department, with worries about over-prescribing. It is about treating pharmacists like proper professionals and, most important, providing quicker access to necessary care, which patients will now properly enjoy.
Dame Andrea Leadsom
May I say a huge thank you to my right hon. Friend for her contribution to kicking this project off? I feel very fortunate to be at the Dispatch Box on the day we launch it, because many others were involved in setting it up. She rightly highlights some of the problems with spotting things such as sepsis infections, which pharmacists are trained to spot. They really can be the first line of defence. Being able to walk in off the high street to see a pharmacist is incredibly valuable to us all.
Draft Anaesthesia Associates and Physician Associates Order 2024
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. This may surprise Members, but I am not a member of the Committee. However, I care about this issue. I believe that the expansion in the number of associates is fully in the interests of patients. By virtue of this Order in Council—which has also been put forward by Scottish Government Ministers—there will be a necessary and rightful route by which physician associates and anaesthesia associates can be regulated by the General Medical Council, with all its professional elements. There will be a curriculum, continuous professional development, and a variety of other things that we expect of other professionals in the NHS and the wider health services.
This may all sound a bit odd. Why do we not just get more people to become doctors? The Government, however, have already addressed that, through the expansion in medical school places that is to happen. I will tell the Committee a personal story, through which I saw the issues at first hand. I will not pretend otherwise: when I was, for a brief time, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, this event reinforced the reasons why I was keen to see this move make the progress that it is making.
About 18 months ago, Parliament was busy with a potential change in leadership, although Prime Minister Boris Johnson was still in post. I suffered an infection and went to a hospital in London, where I waited more than nine hours to see a doctor. I went home without any treatment, and then re-presented myself at a different London hospital, where I got the treatment that I needed within a much shorter time. This meant that I attended my last Cabinet meeting by phone from an NHS hospital bed.
The second hospital was quicker to deal with my situation, because it had a wider range of medical professionals, including a physician associate, who was able to do a lot of the work on the appropriate treatment, although of course that still needed sign-off by the doctor. Instead of patients waiting for hours for that one doctor, the hospital was using a full range of NHS professionals to the extent of their abilities. That is a sensible, practical way to ensure that patient care and safety is absolutely paramount.
Not all hospital trusts have associates, nor are they necessarily planning to have them, but I would strongly recommend that they do. When I think about the number of operations that could be happening, I really welcome the expansion of anaesthesia associates. The anaesthetist will be a key part of that, but imagine one anaesthetist helping with three operations at one time, along with appropriately trained and regulated anaesthesia associates. That is an approach that modernises the NHS’s capacity and capability to treat as many patients as possible.
In the past, there has been resistance to Pharmacy Direct, which is about to be launched, expanding the number of things that pharmacists can do. There has also been resistance to expanding what nurses can do without a doctor’s sign-off. There will be plenty of situations where people in community hospitals say, “Ah, yes, you’ve come in. We will try to treat that in the minor injuries unit, but we don’t have a prescribing nurse here, so you’ve got to either wait, or go to the doctor to get a prescription.” The modern NHS has to think about those situations, and be careful in how it deploys staff. This Order in Council is a key element of that. It brings associates into the same professional regulatory body and inspection regime as doctors—of course, people will know that there are other regulators for different professions.
I felt strongly about coming along to the Committee to support this order and see it progress. For me, patient safety will always be paramount, but I see this as a professional step forward, and I look forward to the change happening right across the United Kingdom.
NHS Winter Update
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Victoria Atkins
I thank the hon. Lady for re-emphasising the critical timing of the strike actions and the impact it has on patients. We know that winter is difficult. It is not just difficult for our healthcare system. Around the world, when cold winter strikes, it has physiological impacts on people with underlying health conditions. We also have a rise in infectious conditions, too. As she will appreciate, that is precisely why, on the advice of clinicians, we brought forward the flu and covid vaccination programme to try to protect the most vulnerable in our society. But again, the timing of the strikes is so very cynical, because their impact and tail will, I am sorry to say, have consequences beyond tomorrow’s stop date.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
I was really concerned when my right hon. Friend mentioned the number of requests made to the BMA for certain duties in hospitals and that only two had been responded to positively. That is really concerning for patients. Contrast that with the behaviour of Nick Hulme, the acting chief executive at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, who has transformed its A&E in terms of waiting times. We need to promote such leaders, but we also need to unreservedly condemn the actions of the BMA junior doctors committee and get the strikes over and done with.
Victoria Atkins
I thank my right hon. Friend for her work in the Department. She knows only too well the difference an inspirational leader can make to a local NHS trust, and at regional or national level. Managers who are good and committed to their local area, who work with their clinicians and other healthcare staff to try to look after patients all year round, have been put under the most enormous pressure over the last few weeks because of the strikes. I thank every single one of them for doing what they can to safeguard patient safety. As I say, I trust their judgment. If they have put patient safety mitigations in, it is because they consider, in their professional judgment, that they are needed.