argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Access to Palliative Care Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-10-23
Topic: Health
Patricia Scotland (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, first, I thank the House for allowing me to speak in the gap in support of the most marvellous Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. She will know that I have been figuratively speaking by her side through all this, but rarely have I had an opportunity to add my voice, so I thank the House for that The expertise of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has given us a great treat, because we have an opportunity to do that which will make a difference to so many. One of the tragedies, of course, is that so many of us fear death because of the possibility of dying in pain or alone. Yet each of us aspires to die with those who are with us, love us and care for us, and we hope to die without pain. The Bill, therefore, enables us to derive hope that those who will care for those in need at the moment of their death will have the skill and expertise to be able to give that which is needed. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, that this is the right topic and at the right time. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said in opening, whoever a dying person is, whatever the time of day or night or day of the week, they will be able to receive high-standard care. That is the aspiration, and the Bill will help us to deliver it Both my parents died after having suffered a severe stroke and after a long period of illness—one for more than a year and the other shortly before that. Yet, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, for me it was the most extraordinary journey to go on with them. I saw strength, care and love, and I too will never forget that. However, both my parents did not die in this country but in the country of my birth, Dominica, where they had no benefit of the National Health Service, and where my family had in effect to create a hospice. I would like to see us here in the United Kingdom make sure that every individual has an opportunity to die not in fear but surrounded by those who love and care for them. The Bill will enable us to do that if we choose to do so. I hope that this House will choose to do that.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Norman Warner (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, I ask the Minister to consider the point that I was trying to make about Amendment 183. The Minister and the Government have got this the wrong way round: if he is actually concerned about levels of efficiency, the supply of services and the issue of scale—and the issue of scale is a very real one—then he needs to be at the front of the process, not the end of it. It is a bit late in the day to be having these ideas about scale in a particular set of services when you have gone through the agony of the local consideration of reconfigurations. As a Minister, it would be better, if I may say so, to set out your views at the beginning with the clinical arguments for why this makes sense. Doing it at the end is bound to lead to suspicions. That is why I was asking the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, to look at the wording of Amendment 183. I say to the Minister that he is putting his involvement at the wrong part of the process.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Simon Stevens (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I will be brief. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in fairness, there is logic to the broad direction being set out by the Government here. As the financial health of foundation trusts improves, their ability to seek self-generated capital investment will, in all likelihood, be much higher, looking over the next four or five years, than it has been during the more constrained financial circumstances of prior years. So it is not unreasonable to have a set of measures in the Bill that would enable Ministers to ensure that the NHS sticks with the capital expenditure, voted for by Parliament, for the NHS in any given year; nor is it unreasonable on the part of the Government to seek to ensure that there is a mechanism by which that capital can be allocated fairly across the country according to need, rather than purely according to an individual institution’s ability to finance it All that being said, rather than this being a fundamental matter of principle in the way that our last two discussions have been, these amendments have a lot to commend them. They are entirely pragmatic and put the right safeguards around what should be only an emergency power. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, laid out, that was the basis on which a consensus was achieved back in 2019. It provides good incentives at trust level for sound financial management and, frankly, it provides a bit of a pressure release or a safety valve against an overly artificially constrained capital settlement in certain years or parts of the country I very much hope that, in the constructive spirit with which I think these amendments are being advanced, this is something that the Government might consider favourably.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Edmund Crisp (Crossbench, Unknown): I thank the Minister for that reply. I have one point to make and one question. My point is that an NHS foundation trust may cover an area that is bigger than one ICB, and some of the bigger ones obviously do, so it does not quite work in the way that the Minister talked about. My question, and it is my final question, is: will officials re-engage with NHS Providers on behalf of NHS foundation trusts to discuss this matter further in the light of what we are saying so forcefully to the Government about pragmatic solutions to find a way forward to achieve the right balance and what the Minister has said in his response?
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Edmund Crisp (Crossbench, Unknown): I thank noble Lords who have spoken in support of the amendment, for the very clear message that has been given. I also thank the Minister for that reply and those final remarks about thinking about this further and discussing it as appropriate with NHS Providers. On that basis, I am very happy to withdraw my amendment.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Molly Christine Meacher (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in moving Amendment 203, I declare my interest as chair of Dignity in Dying, the sister organisation of Compassion in Dying. This amendment is supported by Marie Curie, Together for Short Lives, Hospice UK, Sue Ryder and the Alzheimer’s Society, as well as Compassion in Dying, a national charity which enables people to prepare for the end of life. I thank them all for their support and their briefing. I apologise—I have cut my speech to the bone in light of the late hour.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Jane Susan Campbell (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I wish to oppose the two amendments in this group. Amendment 203 extends the scope of regulations on patient choice under the National Health Service Act to require particular services to be provided at the end of life. It is, I am afraid, clear from the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on Amendments 47 and 52 in Committee that this is to include the right to assisted dying. It is directly linked to Amendment 297 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth I am afraid I do believe that these two amendments are an attempt to hijack the Bill to promote a change in the law on assisted dying. I do not feel tonight is the time to discuss the merits or otherwise of assisted dying. By no stretch of the imagination is assisted dying within the scope of this Bill. There is a separate Private Member’s Bill already before this House, awaiting detailed scrutiny. That is the right vehicle to debate this issue and that is where it should be debated—not here, not tonight and certainly not at this late hour Moreover, Amendment 297 seeks to force the Government’s hand into requiring it to prepare a draft Bill on a subject that has not yet been agreed by Parliament. To date, the Government have, studiously and quite properly, taken a neutral stance. This amendment could be seen as a deliberate manipulation of the parliamentary process to provoke a viewpoint that is known to be contentious, and to force the pace of further scrutiny before Parliament, and before parliamentary time has been made for it Given the existing pressures on the Bill before us, these tactics are, I believe, truly not worthy of your Lordships’ House, so I hope that the Minister agrees with me that the amendments should be rejected and withdrawn. This is not the place to have this debate.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-26
Topic: Health
Alexander Carlile (Crossbench, Unknown): The noble Lord is trespassing on the old Social Democratic Party by using words like disingenuous. I will give him an example: some years ago, I chaired a Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament dealing with the draft Mental Health Bill. That particular Bill was never enacted after our year of meetings and the report that we produced, but there was not a single person or NGO—including some that have been mentioned today—that did not believe that it was a parliamentary Bill. A Bill is a Bill is a Bill. In this Parliament we have draft Bills but not half Bills. That is my answer to the noble Lord I do not want to take up more time. I finish by saying that I think this is a completely misconceived proposal, both procedurally and, were we to come to it, on the merits.
Wellbeing of the Clergy — House of Commons, 2015-06-18
Topic: Health
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): The demanding responsibilities of clergy in the Church and across civic society is having a serious impact on their physical and mental health. In the light of their office holder employment status, what commitments can the Church Commissioners give to improving their duty of care to clergy?
Junior Doctors Contract — House of Lords, 2015-11-30
Topic: Health
Andrew Lansley (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, my noble friend the Minister’s repetition of the Statement and what he was able to say additionally in response to noble Lords was very welcome. Does he agree that going back more than 20 years, to when the new deal for junior doctors was first brought in and we supported them on their concerns about Modernising Medical Careers, we on these Benches have never been lacking in support for junior doctors? We understand that when one is on the ward in a hospital at the weekend, very often the doctor who you see is a junior doctor. The point is that it is in the best interests of junior doctors and patients for seven-day working to be introduced, with proper rostering, rather than discriminating between Monday to Friday and the weekend as if they were different parts of what is in truth the same service. If we get it right, as my noble friend says, it should be possible to achieve such an agreement without bringing any detriment to junior doctors as a consequence, but rather by supporting them in the work that they have to do.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-24
Topic: Health
Ilora Gillian Finlay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this has been a very interesting short debate. I have two issues to raise. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for having raised perverse incentives and, indeed, the danger with perverse incentives that senior consultants with a great deal of experience could be absent from NHS premises when undertaking work such as surgery in other premises; they would therefore not be available to their NHS patients in the event of a problem and some surgery being left to more junior members of staff The other issue is the difficulty of ensuring true consent and information for patients when they are offered choice, with respect to their awareness of the staffing levels in the premises to which they will be going. In some of the private providers, there is not very comprehensive out-of-hours medical cover—particularly at night—with somebody on site. There is also a problem that, if a patient should develop a complication, foreseen or even unforeseen, and is in need of an intervention, they may then need to be transferred to a local NHS intensive care unit. In that event, it would be important for the money to follow the patient. If that intensive care unit is out of the area from which the patient has come, I hope that the regulations will allow for appropriate funding of that NHS facility.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-24
Topic: Health
Norman Warner (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 146 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, but I support all the amendments in this group. Taken together and perhaps integrated a bit better, they strengthen the focus in the Bill on workforce issues and workforce planning. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, on his contribution to open government For too long, we have been preoccupied with the funding of our health and care system and have tended to assume—I confess that as a Minister I certainly did this to some extent—that if Governments made enough money available, we would be able to acquire the staff we needed, always forgetting, I think, that health and care is a highly labour-intensive industry, possibly the most highly labour-intensive industry in our country We were often very good at masking the shortcomings in our planning system by historically relying on recruitment from abroad. There were doctors from Africa, India and Europe, nurses from the Philippines and elsewhere, and we had a lot of staff coming in from the EU to work in our social care sector. Brexit and our national preoccupation with limiting immigration has changed all that, and that is before we calculate the effect of Covid on health and care staff recruitment. To give your Lordships just one example, pre-Brexit, 40% of the social care staff in London came from the EU. You simply cannot make that ground up very quickly Today’s reality for recruiting health and care staff is that we are operating in a highly competitive national and international labour market. That situation will not change any time soon. The probabilities are that we will have to pay more for staff and give more thought to our working practices and conditions. We will have to do a much better job of planning ahead and take much more seriously the training, support and recruitment and retention of this increasingly scarce resource—people I suggest that Ministers—I include all of us who have been Ministers—must stop political bragging about how many new doctors and nurses a Government will produce, often without the foggiest idea of how long it will take to do so. Ministers might want to give more consideration as to whether they have the right skills in the sector in the first place, before commissioning the training of highly paid, highly skilled professionals. We have not done a very good job of looking at the extent to which many of the jobs done by doctors could be done by other professionals. Our attempt to train nurses in prescribing has been only half-hearted in using the skills that we have paid for them to develop.
NHS and Social Care Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-11
Topic: Health
Philippa Whitford (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Here we are again debating the NHS. [Interruption.] I am all on my own because obviously this is predominantly a crisis in NHS England, not a crisis in NHS Scotland, as I will discuss as we go on The problem is that we are talking about patients who are suffering—who may suffer from more infections, as we have heard. We are talking about staff who are in tears and who are desperate, and who feel that they cannot deliver the care they would expect to deliver. This is not just a matter of isolated stories of "Joe from Wiltshire" and "Mike from Leeds": it is happening on a major scale. We hear from NHS Improvement that only one trust out of 152 met the four-hour target in December, and only nine made it to over 90%. Fifty out of 152 trusts declared a black or red situation over December, and there were 158 diversions of ambulances over that time. This is not just about normal winter pressures. It is not what the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), who is an A&E nurse, and people like me and other medics in the Chamber have seen in our careers—it is a really bad winter. Yet we have not had bitter weather and we have not had a flu epidemic The most recent four-hour data were published in October, when NHS England managed to achieve the four-hour target for 83.7% of the time. That is 5% down on the same time in the previous year, and it compares with 93.9% in Scotland. Scotland managed 93.5% in Christmas week. We have our challenges in Scotland, but the crisis is not the same as what is being discussed here.
NHS and Social Care Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-11
Topic: Health
Philippa Whitford (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Many doctors in general practice would accept the argument for having access to a GP on Saturday morning, particularly for people who are otherwise at work. However, someone who cannot see their favourite doctor is very unlikely to go to A&E and wait eight hours to see a doctor they have never seen before in their life. This is not about that; this is about the fact that people feel they cannot find an alternative. If it takes three or four weeks to get any appointment with their GP and they do not yet have a community pharmacy offering such a service, they will eventually end up at A&E. It is therefore the service of last resort for people who go there and just stay there. We have to develop alternatives first, but as the hon. Gentleman says, no one in their right mind would choose to go and wait four hours in A&E if they could be seen in half an hour in a community pharmacy.
NHS and Social Care Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-11
Topic: Health
Philippa Whitford (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Public consultation is important, and not just in the way it has often been done in the past—"We’ve made a decision, it’s a fait accompli, and we’re coming and telling you about it." Unfortunately, that is very much what we have heard about the STP process, partly because it has been so short and partly, I am afraid, because it is about budget-centred care, not patient-centred care. Areas have been given a number and told, "If you’re not reaching this number, don’t bother submitting your plan," and they are working back from that. That will not achieve an efficient, integrated service, so the public must be involved Frontline clinicians must also be involved. They work in a service and know exactly what the bottlenecks are and exactly what horseshoe nail is missing and holding a service back. If we have clinician-led redesign, such as I was involved in for breast cancer in my health board 17 years ago, we can track a patient’s path. We can quickly imagine ourselves as a patient, see the bottlenecks and focus investment on them I read an article yesterday stating that three hospitals in Manchester have spent £6 million on management consultants to say, "Shut a ward, sack hundreds of people and jack up the parking charges." I am sorry, but that was not good value for £2 million each.
Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-10-11
Topic: Defense
Judith Anne Jolly (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the noble and gallant Lords have made the case about the phrase "part-time" clearly and with force. In Committee, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, questioned, "the sense and the potential for misunderstanding and for belittling the reputation of the Armed Forces if the phrase ‘part-time’ is specifically used in the mixed and more flexible working arrangements".—[Official Report, 12/9/17; col. GC 59.] I have re-read the Hansard report of the Committee stage and my understanding from the Minister’s response there is that the wording in the Bill has been carefully crafted to ensure that protections—such as from recall to either full-time duty or deployment—are in place for any serviceperson working part-time. The Minister suggested that the Bill’s wording will provide more certainty for the individual, affording them rights to remain on a flexible working arrangement that can be revoked only under certain circumstances, such as a national emergency However, I understand what the noble and gallant Lord is saying. I believe that it is incumbent on those who are in positions of authority to promote the measures contained in the Bill, although I feel, on my left, some discomfort coming my way. The culture needs to become more positive and not allow there to be a negative connotation that "part-time" is unprofessional, unskilled or lacking in commitment—I think that 24/7/52 is the expression that was used. Will the Minister give a commitment that, as part of the rollout of the flexible working scheme, it is made absolutely clear within the Armed Forces that neither "part-time" nor "flexible" are pejorative terms but that they carry the same level of commitment, professionalism and skill as "full-time"?
Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-10-11
Topic: Defense
Julie Smith (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I thank the Minister for his very full reply. It would be nice to think that Her Majesty’s Government as a whole and, in particular, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will ensure that the money put aside for defence will enable all those words to be brought about in practice and that we do not need to worry about the money that will be put aside for accommodation. In the light of the discussion about the future accommodation model, the idea that proposals will come forward later in the year and the suggestion of putting questions into the Armed Forces covenant report, I am content to withdraw the amendment. However, I should very much like to take the Minister up on his suggestion of a meeting.
Mental Health Provision (Children and Young People) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-03-18
Topic: Health
Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I applaud a Conservative Member for talking to a Liberal Democrat about localism. I wholeheartedly embrace localism and would like to see much more local accountability for spending, and yes, there will sometimes be obvious reasons for variability. However, I would ask whether £15.90 sounds like a reasonable amount to spend per child on mental health. Unless there is a suggestion that in Halton there are pretty much no children struggling with mental health, which I doubt is the case, that tenfold difference does need investigation. Looking at the figures, Halton is one of the areas that has had a massive percentage increase in the past year, presumably to try to correct for that very low level of spending and the need that is there My Bill would make the publication of data on the provision of those services a statutory requirement. As such, we could secure a higher quality of data published in a coterminous way across NHS units—currently clinical commissioning groups, but in future integrated care systems—and local authorities by requiring publication on a regional basis. The Bill would also put a specific requirement on Government to publish spending per head on child and adolescent mental health services, as well as the proportion of overall NHS spending and mental health spending on CAMHS by region Clause 2 also requests that a statement be included as to whether the expenditure has met the aims of the NHS long-term plan. That is an important requirement to ensure the mental health investment standard is met. The standard is the Government’s tool to ensure CCGs increase how much they spend on mental health every year and, in particular, on children and young people’s mental health. Reporting on that standard has been of variable quality in recent years, with some areas reporting that they met the standard while including one-off, non-recurring pots of money or dementia and learning disability spending, all of which are specifically excluded.