Health and Wellbeing Services: Essex

Will Quince Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) on securing this important debate on health and wellbeing services in Essex. Her powerful speech raised a number of issues affecting all parts of Essex, including my own, in north Essex, and specifically Colchester. Understandably, I plan to focus on north Essex and my constituency, but given that I stood down as a Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care only in late November, I want to start with some reflections on our NHS more generally. May I say in passing that the Minister is doing a marvellous job with a difficult brief? As he knows, it is a privilege and an honour to be a Minister at the Department of Health and Social Care and to be part of our NHS’s story.

The NHS is a universal, comprehensive system that is free at the point of use and paid for through taxation—principles that remain intact and that receive strong public and political support today. At its heart, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham set out, the NHS is not about buildings and equipment—as important as those are, and we are of course passionate about health centres, hospitals and the latest technology—but about the circa 2 million people who work in it day in, day out to deliver and facilitate the high-quality care we rightly expect. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who works in our NHS, especially those working in north Essex and those serving patients and my constituents in Colchester.

We all have our personal experiences of our NHS and of the care that we and our families have received. When we think about the future of health and wellbeing services in Essex, we have to be mindful of the broader context, much of which my right hon. Friend set out in her powerful speech. Our NHS is under significant and considerable pressure and faces a number of challenges. We have increasing demand, particularly in primary care and in urgent and emergency care. We are living longer, which is brilliant, but it comes with challenges, including living with complex conditions and comorbidities.

Social care continues to be a challenge, especially around workforce, as my right hon. Friend set out. We have increasing demand on mental health services. We had the covid pandemic, with the backlog and the waiting lists, but also the resulting later diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and other conditions, as many people were unable to or did not come forward with symptoms or for regular check-ups.

We also have the at times seemingly intractable complexity of NHS structures and processes; the silo mentality that we sadly see so often; the multiple tiers and archaic processes; the challenges in rolling out the latest innovative technologies, such as tech, drugs, treatment and therapies, that are available in some parts of Essex or the country but not in others; and the issue of making sure that research and innovation is truly embedded in every single trust in the country.

That is not an exhaustive list, and I have not mentioned two of the biggest challenges—workforce and funding—one of which my right hon. Friend touched on in some detail. First, on funding, the NHS will always need increased funding to reflect the changing nature of medicine and the health needs of our population and, importantly, to ensure that we have the very latest and most innovative and cutting-edge medtech, treatments, drugs, procedures and therapies for our patients. Despite record revenue and capital budgets for our NHS, year-on-year real-terms increases in funding, and further significant funding—in fact, several billion pounds of funding—announced in the spring Budget, which I massively welcome, budgets remain a challenge for local systems and for trusts, not just in Essex but across the country.

Secondly, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, workforce is absolutely vital to our NHS, and she was right to mention the hugely important contribution that international staff make—they have contributed since its formation, and continue to do so. Regardless of the NHS long-term workforce plan, as important as it is, international recruitment will still have a hugely important role to play.

I was a Minister at the DHSC when the Government commissioned NHS England to produce the first ever NHS long-term workforce plan, which the Minister will no doubt elaborate on. The plan was then published, backed with £2.4 billion over the next five years by the Government. It included things like doubling medical school places, including at Anglia Ruskin University, which we are incredibly proud of; huge increases in nursing, midwifery and allied health professional training places; and a plan for retention—it is critical that it is about not just recruitment but retention and, of course, reform.

We talk about workforce and funding, but the truth is that addressing those two things alone will not tackle the challenges our NHS faces either nationally or locally. Only by innovating and transforming local systems and the delivery of health and care provision at a local level can we deliver on what we all aspire to across this House, which is our local populations living longer, healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives.

I firmly believe that integrated care systems, which my right hon. Friend touched on, are at the heart of achieving that. They are working holistically at a local level to get systems focusing relentlessly on patient outcomes and patient experiences, and breaking down the silo mentality that we have sadly so often seen in our NHS historically. Their other critical role is driving transformation and innovation at a local level, getting trusts and organisations to work together, and using all assets and capacity within health systems.

I pay tribute, as my right hon. Friend did, to the leadership of the Suffolk & North East Essex Integrated Care System—Dr Ed Garratt and his team. I know how closely they work with Nick Hulme and his team at the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust or, as it is known locally, Colchester and Ipswich Hospitals. Our health system more broadly, and our two acute hospital trusts in north Essex and east Suffolk, face many of the challenges I set out earlier, but to their great credit, they are continuously looking at innovative ways to address them.

For example, our system in north Essex and east Suffolk is consistently one the highest and best-performing in the country. It had the fastest roll-out of the covid-19 vaccine. It is a top performer for diabetes care. It has consistently low levels of delayed discharge, an issue my right hon. Friend the Minister and his fellow Minister, the Minister for Social Care, spent a lot of time focusing on, and rightly so, because of the continued pressure on urgent and emergency care and the importance of tackling delayed discharge.

Our local system has also led on innovation. It has developed the Care Tech Campus and the challenge fund, in particular, with the University of Essex and Essex County Council. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witham was right to praise the role that Councillors Kevin Bentley and John Spence have played in that, working in partnership with the health system to deliver innovation in care that is providing not just better outcomes, but a better experience for patients. Finally, our local system is leading the way on National Institute for Health and Care Research-funded research, which we want more trusts across the country to do.

Before I finish, I want to raise a handful of initiatives in north Essex and east Suffolk that I think deserve highlighting, because they are going to be transformational in terms of both patient experience and outcome. The first is the elective orthopaedic centre at Colchester Hospital, which I was fortunate enough to have a tour of recently. It is hugely exciting. It is an impressive £64 million facility serving north-east Essex and east Suffolk. It is the largest of its kind in Europe, at over 11,000 square metres, and will include eight theatres, three wards, a physio, a gym, a day surgery, a recovery centre and its own imaging department. Importantly—I know the Minister will be pleased to hear this—it will enable 10,000 procedures a year following its opening, which is due to take place this August.

The second initiative is the Clacton community diagnostic centre, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling). I am sorry he could not be here for the debate, but I want to reference it as it serves the wider area. The centre is a £25 million investment in state-of-the-art diagnostics, meaning that patients can access the full range of diagnostic services, including CT scans, MRI scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, blood scans and cardiorespiratory medicine. Importantly—I visited a lot of community diagnostic centres when I was in the Minister’s role—this facility has delivered more than 110,000 treatments in the past year. I would love it if the Minister could check this, but I think that it must be one of the highest performing centres—if not the highest performing centre—in the country.

I want to turn now to two mental health and mental resilience projects, which our integrated care system is leading on and which I think deserve a mention. The first is the north-east Essex mental health joint response vehicle, which was successfully commissioned as a three-year service following a successful pilot between January and March 2023. This unique service is a collaboration between the East of England Ambulance Service and the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust—our mental health trust—with a paramedic and mental health practitioner manning a 10-hour service seven days a week. That service has been so successful in ensuring that those experiencing a mental health crisis are seen by the most appropriate service. I am really keen that we extend those hours, and I know that the ICS is looking at securing additional funding to do so.

The data backs up why it is a good thing to do. In 2023, the joint response vehicle attended 757 patient calls for a variety of mental health-related presentations, including suicidal threat, self-harm, depression and psychosis, with 77% of patients being redirected to another service or provided with a care plan at home, reducing by 55% the number of attendances at emergency departments for mental health-related issues. I will not need to remind the Minister that mental health is not only one of the largest drivers of attendance at our emergency departments, especially involving conveyance via ambulance, but leads to some of the longest cubicle occupation in our emergency departments, as hospitals do not have the beds to move people up and into, and often takes up additional resource, such as police officers and others.

The second initiative I want to touch on involves primary school wellbeing hubs—these are more about mental resilience, but I think that that is an important area to highlight. When I was Schools Minister and Children’s Minister, we worked closely with the Department of Health and Social Care on investment in mental health resilience support with mental health support teams, on training for schools and on the support teams that would go into schools to provide that support.

The Tendring and Colchester wellbeing hubs are a pilot project with 22 primary schools in Colchester and Tendring, which aims to improve children’s mental health and wellbeing through a prevention and early intervention approach. This programme has delivered across 22 schools, with 19 of them completing a number of questionnaires that have been evaluated by the University of Essex to demonstrate the impact and evaluate the programme over the 12 months in which it has run.

Overall, pupils who attended the wellbeing hub sessions had significant increases in their levels of resilience, wellbeing and happiness and decreased anxiety. The initiative was supported by more than 80% of parents, who said that their children communicated better, while more than 60% of children said they had more confidence and were more resilient and less stressed or anxious. I know that such programmes are happening to varying degrees across the country, but our integrated care system is really leading the way and demonstrating things that could be replicated and rolled out to other parts of the country.

In conclusion, I thank again all those involved in the delivery of healthcare across north Essex, as well as the leadership of the Suffolk & North East Essex Integrated Care System and the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust for driving the innovation and transformation of health and care provision locally. We know that that is the future of delivering not just better a patient experience, but better patient outcomes. I once again thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham for giving us the opportunity to talk about health and wellbeing services in Essex, which, as she rightly said, we all care so passionately about. We all know that the challenges both locally and nationally are significant, and we all want and expect world-class care for our constituents. I know that I and all my Essex colleagues will continue to work with our local NHS bodies in all their guises to support them to deliver it.