Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) (No. 2) Regulations 2021 — House of Lords, 2021-12-14
Topic: Health
Joan Walmsley (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, before I follow up my noble friend Lady Tyler’s comments, I want to say how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. The way in which this has been done—I agree also with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—is absolutely shocking; it is a contempt of Parliament. I was horrified when I read the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee about how bad it was and how late the sort of impact assessment—I call it a sort of impact assessment —has been produced Of course, we do not need an impact assessment to know what the problem at the heart of this is, apart from the compulsion element, which I understand: it is the fact that so many people are hesitant and mistrusting about having a vaccination. We also know from the work of Healthwatch, mentioned by my noble friend, that the most effective way of addressing the problems that people have with the vaccination is to have a one-to-one discussion with them so that they can say what their problems are and have them addressed. It needs to be done with a person whom they trust—somebody who they believe has some knowledge and understanding of the issues The difficulty with doing this at the moment is that all those people are very busy. We have the winter problems coming up; we have the omicron variant of Covid-19 increasing day by day and our NHS is on the edge of falling over. So I have a little suggestion for the Minister. There are plenty of doctors and nurses relatively recently retired who for one reason or another are reluctant to come back into the front line at the moment. However, they retain the respect of the health community. I understand from the executive summary that the total cost of replacing members of staff who are likely to leave because, whatever happens, they do not want to have a vaccine is £270 million. Could not some of that money be used to get those doctors and nurses with the knowledge and the trust of their recent fellows to have those conversations, without interrupting the staffing of hospitals, where it is bad enough at the moment, as we have lots of vacancies? We know that we cannot take all those people out to have those conversations, because it takes time and it has to be done with sensitivity and consideration. Could not some of that money be used to bring back some of those very experienced people to have those conversations and, hopefully, to reduce the number of those who absolutely will not be vaccinated and, sadly, will leave the profession I shall ask the Minister one more question. A few weeks ago, I asked him whether patients had the right to request that they should be treated by vaccinated staff only. Whatever the Government do, it will not all be done until April, which is months away. So there will be lots of patients treated between now and then by people who are not vaccinated. I asked the Minister whether patients had a right to request to be treated by vaccinated people only. He very kindly wrote to me, but I am afraid he was not able to give me a definitive answer. Now all the work has been done on this statutory instrument, I wonder whether things have become any clearer on that issue.