NHS 10-Year Plan

Vicky Ford Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Hammond]

The hon. Lady will know that, as I said a moment ago, the long-term plan, for the first time, sets a parity between mental health and physical health. The mental health budget will increase by £2.3 billion by 2023-24.

Of course, everything we have been talking about here needs to be supported by new innovations and new technology. Patients can expect a radical reshaping of how the NHS delivers its healthcare using technology, so that services and users can benefit from the opportunities of advances in digital technologies. That includes making care safer, enabling earlier diagnosis and giving more independence to those managing different health conditions.

Additionally, it is vital that we build a more innovative NHS, which will help patients to be among the first in the world to benefit from life-changing new technologies. Last year, the Secretary of State announced his ambition to sequence 5 million genomes in the next five years, making the NHS the first national healthcare system to offer whole genome sequencing as part of routine care.

Most importantly, none of that will be possible without dedicated staff who are properly trained and supported throughout their career. The long-term plan sets out a strategic framework to ensure that, over the next 10 years, the NHS will have the staff it needs to ensure that the detailed plan can be implemented. Baroness Harding is leading an inclusive programme of work to set out a detailed workforce implementation plan, which will be published in the spring, but the plan is not about numbers.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

On the future workforce, I thank the Government for investing in our new medical schools. We are enormously proud of the new medical school in Chelmsford, which is training 100 doctors a year—I understand it is 12 times oversubscribed for next year. I am also pleased to hear that nursing numbers are up, but what will the Government do to target support at areas such as mental health nursing and adult nursing, where we have seen numbers drop?

[Stephen Hammond]

My hon. Friend is right that we need targeted support, which is why we have looked not only at increasing the recruitment of nurses but at the retention packages that might be offered, particularly for certain specialties—she mentioned mental health nurses. We have looked at the possibility of issuing golden hellos, and we have looked at targeted support for childcare and travel.