argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill — House of Lords, 2019-02-19
Topic: Health
Jonathan Marks (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I propose to withdraw the amendment at this stage. We have had a lively debate, and I am grateful to everybody who has taken part in it and extremely grateful to the Minister for her comprehensive reply. In begging leave to withdraw the amendment, however, I urge the Government to consider very seriously the points made in this group and the last on the two issues that our amendment raises. The first is the global scope of the Bill and the second is the extent of the powers, particularly in Clause 2 On the global scope, of course we wish the Government the very best of fortune in negotiating reciprocal arrangements against the horrible possibility of leaving the EU without a deal. If that can be done and reciprocal healthcare with as many countries as possible can be safeguarded in that way, that is all to the good. The Minister made technical points about the need to change our amendments to cover difficulties that might arise if they were passed in their present form. If she is attracted by the idea of restricting this Bill to EU, EEA and Switzerland arrangements, we would be very keen to discuss with her ways in which the amendment can be altered and for her to come back on Report with a different type of Bill On the powers, everything that needed to be said was said in the first group. Our amendment would replace the unacceptable powers with the aim of replicating the arrangements we have with the EU. If I may say so, it is a very important aim. I do not believe this House will let powers of the nature of those included in Clause 2 at present pass Report without dividing—and I have a fairly clear idea what the outcome of any such Division will be. So we will come back to this on Report—probably, in any event. It is an important issue that we raise On the dangers I saw in future healthcare agreements with third countries outside the EU, EEA and Switzerland, I was pressed—in a number of interventions that I can only describe as vigorous—by a former Health Secretary, a former Health Minister and an existing Health Minister, and I stood up to those interventions as best I could. But after I sat down, as one always does I remembered something I probably ought to have said. To be fair, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, passed me her iPad with a mention of something I ought to have said. It was a quote from a document, and I will read it: "The Bill will provide a legislative framework to implement any future longer-term reciprocal healthcare arrangements with the EU, individual Member States or countries outside the EU. The Bill is also a key piece of legislation to ensure that the UK can respond to all possible scenarios" As the Minister probably recognises, that document originated with the lady who signed it "Yours, Nicola"—the Minister. That is the danger. We are concerned; it is a concern that needs addressing. With those words, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill — House of Lords, 2019-02-19
Topic: Health
Jonathan Marks (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will speak to the amendment in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton As the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, pointed out in moving the amendment, our existing arrangements are the result of European law. The EHIC scheme is provided by EU regulation 883 of 2004. As was mentioned at Second Reading, there are 27 million active EHICs in circulation. Most importantly from our point of view, the S1 scheme entitles 190,000 UK pensioners living elsewhere in the EU to healthcare provision on the basis that they are in receipt of a UK pension. The scheme also entitles anyone enjoying an income from a particular member state but living elsewhere within the EU and EEA countries to reciprocal healthcare. The S2 scheme authorises pre-authorised elected health and maternity care abroad for those away from their country of residence or those who choose to go away to receive that care. The S1 and S2 schemes are established under the same EU regulation. The patients’ rights directive enables patients from one EU or EEA country to access specialist or high-quality healthcare available in different member states of their choice and to claim reimbursement from the member state of which they are resident. The common feature of all these beneficial arrangements is that they are established under European law I repeat all the questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, has asked. My concern is that there seems to be an aversion, which I would accurately describe as pathological, among members of the Government, and many advocates of Brexit in the Conservative Party’s ranks, to dispute resolution that depends on the European Court of Justice having a role that ultimately monitors the development of the law. It is important to ensure that, whatever arrangements we have for reciprocal healthcare, we have a sensible and practical dispute-resolution system, and one that develops in accordance with EU law under the regulations and the directive that are being replicated No one has come up with any suggestion at all that there is anything wrong with or unworkable about the arrangement whereby our legal rights to reciprocal healthcare are embodied in domestic law but are subject to an appellate arrangement that ensures consistency across the EU and the EEA under the aegis of the Court of Justice of the European Union. But if political dogma is to drive us to adopt an alternative, the Government need to start thinking now about what that alternative will be and how it will ensure the important objective of securing a body of healthcare law, consonant with the law of the European Union, that will apply to future arrangements with our partners as developments continue. I support this amendment.
Ukraine Update — House of Lords, 2022-03-10
Topic: Defense
Annabel Goldie (Conservative, Centre-right): As my noble friend will be aware, and as I said earlier, the United Kingdom, both bilaterally with Ukraine and in concert with our NATO allies, has been concentrating on responding to the situation in Ukraine. That response has called for a specific commitment from the United Kingdom in relation to defence resource and defence equipment, and that is the focus of our thoughts at the moment.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): The noble Baroness is absolutely right that throughout the crisis we have led the way on data reporting, and have ensured that data is always available to the public. UKHSA will keep the content and frequency of reporting on Covid—including the GOV.UK dashboard—under close review, to ensure that statistics are being produced of the appropriate quality and transparency, and that they remain useful and relevant in accordance with the code of practice for statistics. So we will continue to publish information.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): We have always made it clear that as we move through Covid we would move away from free testing, and that is what we intend to do. As there are now high levels of immunity across the population as a result of vaccination and natural infection, future testing and isolation will play a less important role in preventing serious illness, and, as I have said in response to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, we will be working with retailers to establish and develop a private market for lateral flow tests.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): The noble Lord will be aware that we have announced that we will end free testing, but it will not finish until the end of March; we are not stopping free testing immediately. There will obviously be the opportunity for people to get tests during that time. As the noble Baroness said, the test, trace and isolation budget in 2020-21 exceeded the entire budget of the Home Office. It cost a further £15.7 billion this financial year and £2 billion in January alone, at the height of the omicron wave. We want to move to the next phase as we begin to live with Covid, and ending free testing is one aspect of that approach.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Andrew Robathan (Conservative, Centre-right): Unusually, I congratulate the Government—first on the outstanding success of the vaccine programme, which really has been world leading, and secondly on this policy of living with Covid. It is extremely important that we rely on personal responsibility and common sense, and do not listen to the siren voices from SAGE and others who say that we must stay locked down for ever. Can my noble friend please tell me what the death rate has been in the last month, compared with the death rate in 2018-19?
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my noble friend. I do not have the exact figures to hand but, as I said, the reporting of deaths is always slightly delayed. It has started to decline now and we expect this to continue. The latest evidence suggests that the risk of presentation to emergency care or hospital admission with omicron is approximately half that for delta.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): As I mentioned in response to a previous question, we are giving notice that free lateral flow tests will come to an end at the end of March. But, as I also said in an earlier answer, we will retain laboratory networks and diagnostic capabilities to ensure that PCR testing can be stood up in the event of a resurgence or a dangerous new variant.
Living with Covid-19 — House of Lords, 2022-02-22
Topic: Health
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my noble friend. He is right that our plan for living with Covid prioritises moving to a world where the country manages Covid like other respiratory diseases. Our response is underpinned by four principles: living with Covid by removing restrictions while encouraging safer behaviours; protecting those most vulnerable to Covid; maintaining resilience to be able to spot and respond to new variants; and securing innovations and opportunities from our Covid response, including investment in life sciences.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2021-12-07
Topic: Health
Joan Bakewell (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I welcome a Bill that brings together the National Health Service and social care. How could I not? It is a long overdue development. However, I have serious reservations about the Bill’s direction of travel. I fear that the reforms set out here will fragment and disconnect the NHS from the very people—the patients—it was created to serve. The proliferation of protest groups and increasing numbers of petitions, as well as individual cases to challenge existing changes being taken all the way to the High Court, all bear witness to a popular groundswell of opposition to what is happening There also comes a warning this week from former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt about the risk of equity-funded investment in care homes. When the motive is profit, he says, standards of care are squeezed. The NHS motive is exclusively private care—and so we come to the continuing inroads made into the NHS by Centene, America’s leading health insurance company and its subsidiaries in this country under Operose. They have been steadily buying up surgeries around the country and including them on their schedule of profit-making enterprises designed to offer good returns to their global shareholders Anyone with any knowledge of American healthcare, whether first-hand or reported, will know how expensive it is. The level of your care depends on the level of your insurance; without insurance, you can be refused care. The New Yorker recently reported that American hospitals are closing at a rate of 30 a year. It reported that, increasingly, hospitals are seen as businesses—that "a fifth of hospitals are now run for profit, and, globally, private-equity investment in health care has tripled since 2015." In 2019, according to this report, some £60 billion was spent on acquisitions globally. That "globally" includes—indeed targets—us and our NHS Centene and its British subsidiary Operose now own 70 surgeries around the country, from Leeds to Luton, from Doncaster to Newport Pagnell, from Nottingham to Southend, and in many other areas, Centene/Operose now owns and runs for profit surgeries formerly owned and run by NHS doctors. It is now the biggest provider of GP services in the country. It has further designs on the existing fabric of the NHS, seeking to have its representatives sitting on the boards of CCGs, and making decisions about the deployment of NHS funding. This is a direction of travel that needs to be monitored and checked—and it will be Why does all this matter, as long as patients have good and free treatment at the point of delivery, wherever they need it? What is the reputation of the company Centene in America? It is not good. Since the year 2000, there have been 174 recorded penalties against Centene, its subsidiaries and its agents for contract-related offences against its patients. The fines paid by Centene go into millions—billions—of dollars. This is not a fit company to be part of the NHS. I repeat the Government’s campaigning cry: "Take back control"—of our NHS.
Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2021-12-07
Topic: Health
Clive Brooke (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his introduction. I think he would be wise to reflect on what happened in 2012; he was not around, but there was a period of pausing to reflect before the Government decided to return to the work and move on. Given the problems we may encounter this winter, it is vital that health, not reorganisation, comes first, and the Government should be willing to delay if need be Changes to the Bill are needed. I am no expert on the overall structure of the NHS and its related bodies; my interest is primarily in welcoming in the Bill the mention of the narrow areas I work on, including public health related to obesity, diabetes, addictions, alcohol and so on. I welcome the movement on obesity, but more work needs to be done there. I give notice that I will raise some issues that were raised in the Commons concerning labelling, calories and alcohol The other big issue that I know a little about is the workforce. There is another angle from which we can try to approach this shortage of resources; we can look perhaps at the further development of social prescribing. As we all know, there is a considerable fund of support and enthusiasm for the NHS. Some 750,000 people volunteered to give service in the early part of the Covid pandemic, but nothing has really been done; from what I hear in speaking to some of them, they were not even contacted afterwards or given anything to do This is a major failing on our part, so I hope we might look beyond the NHS structure and see whether we can get greater resources there to help us. Matt Hancock’s idea of the National Academy for Social Prescribing is good. There is no reason why we should not endeavour to increase the number of people working in that area and have a faster rollout than presently planned. If we could do that, it would to a degree ease burdens on the staff in the NHS itself. We should look further to see how we can have greater public and patient involvement in the National Health Service. We have seen the great fund of good will there over the course of the past two years. I regret to say that we have not really built any kind of structure to pull more people in, one way or another. I was interested in NHS charities. In 2018, I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, about creating a national charity for the NHS to which people like me could leave something in their wills. At present, I have nothing designated for the NHS, but I would like to give something. As I get older and have to have more and more treatment, I am sure I will feel even more grateful. There is a local charity in Chelsea and Westminster where I live, but it is not well known. Communications need to be reviewed to establish closer relationships between the charities and the public. There is a great fund there, with money and physical resources available for the NHS, if the authorities are prepared to look down more, rather than looking upwards all the time. That would be to the benefit of the country overall.
Creative Sector — House of Lords, 2021-11-04
Topic: Culture
Genista Mary McIntosh (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, very warmly, on securing this debate and on setting out the issues so very clearly and lucidly. During a long career in the arts and in your Lordships’ House, I have probably opined on most of the things that she mentioned at least once and sometimes many times. I am not sure that I could ever possibly have done it as well as or better than she did today. I also congratulate those who follow, because there is very little that I can add to what has already been said or will be said by the extraordinarily well-informed group which I am privileged to be part of today. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Spencer, to the House. He will be a great asset to us. I look forward to hearing from him again in the future I want to talk briefly about one of our most important cultural assets, which was referred to, albeit in passing, by the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone: the BBC. We know that there are some people, possibly quite a few, who resent having to pay the licence fee that entitles us all to access the vast range of programming provided by the BBC. Those people would prefer to pay only for what they use. Perhaps we might think about applying that to the NHS. We also know that there is a small but vocal and influential minority who would like to see the BBC diminished because they regard it as a threat to their commercial interests. There are a few people, including some politicians, who are convinced that the BBC is irretrievably biased towards what they see as a liberal metropolitan world view, and would therefore like to see it reined in These are all reasonable, defensible positions. I do not agree with any of them but that does not prevent me understanding them. What is not reasonable or defensible is government interference in a well-tried and thus far largely independent process to appoint the chair of a key regulator, apparently to smooth the way for a candidate previously deemed unappointable, whose well-publicised attitude to the BBC is, shall we say, less than supportive. Also not defensible is a senior government figure—a Cabinet Minister, no less—making barely veiled threats about the BBC’s future funding in reaction to one experienced journalist’s momentary and perhaps understandable frustration I am sure that the Minister, who I know takes his brief very seriously, will want to give the House a different perspective on these problem issues, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say, because I believe that the BBC, despite its flaws, of which there are many, is a public good and matters to our culture, creativity, politics and international reputation in more ways and for more reasons than this Government sometimes seem to understand—or perhaps they understand them all too well. Either way, those who would like to see the BBC taken down should be careful what they wish for.
Cigarette Stick Health Warnings Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-03-18
Topic: Health
George Young (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, this Bill extends the logic of health warnings on cigarette packs to the cigarettes themselves. If implemented, it would require both cigarettes and cigarette papers to display health warnings such as "Smoking kills". This is likely to be particularly effective for dissuading children, who tend to start smoking with individual cigarettes rather than packs While England is undoubtedly among the most successful nations in the world at tackling the tobacco epidemic, we have tended to follow rather than lead when it comes to the implementation of bold policies to address this deadly addiction. The Bill gives us the opportunity to be the first, helping to cement our place as a world leader in tobacco control We know that only one-third of the 280 children who take up smoking every day in England will successfully quit, and another third will go on to die from smoking-related diseases. These cigarette warnings were one of the recommendations by the APPG on Smoking and Health for the forthcoming tobacco plan, which we discussed at a recent meeting with Javed Khan, the chair of the Government’s independent review into smoking. We were encouraged by his interest in all our recommendations, including this one, and we look forward to seeing his report, which is due to be published on 22 April While we could be the first to implement cigarette warnings, this is not a novel policy. I first proposed cigarette warnings as a Health Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the late 1970s. By 2024, I will have been in Parliament for 50 years. I hope I will not have to wait that long before this policy is introduced. I beg to move.
Gosport Independent Panel: Publication of Report — House of Lords, 2018-06-20
Topic: Health
Alexander Carlile (Crossbench, Unknown): Does the Minister agree that it is particularly shocking that those who did not cover up—the brave staff who expressed concerns about what was happening—were ignored for so long? Does he agree that the culture of closing ranks among some medical staff should be regarded in itself as serious professional misconduct by doctors and others? Does he also agree that there should be training in the whole of the NHS which makes it easier for staff to identify the excessive use of opiates and to have action taken upon it?
Gosport Independent Panel: Publication of Report — House of Lords, 2018-06-20
Topic: Health
Susan Lilian Primrose Cunliffe-Lister (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this tragedy has similarity to Shipman and Stafford Hospital. Does the Minister agree that there should be a far better and quick complaints procedure? This has been needed for years. Nurses should feel free and safe to bring up matters of worry concerning their seniors and colleagues, and relatives should have help to complain and be listened to.
Gosport Independent Panel: Publication of Report — House of Lords, 2018-06-20
Topic: Health
Molly Christine Meacher (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the events at the Gosport War Memorial Hospital all those years ago are indeed shocking, but will the Minister consider that they are perhaps a symptom of the fact that we do not have an assumption in end-of-life care that patients’ wishes must be respected? One aspect of this, perhaps slightly removed from Gosport but nevertheless relevant, is that, if people are terminally ill and enduring unbearable suffering but are mentally competent, they have no way of ensuring that they, the patients, can take control and decide when they have suffered enough. In this culture of paternalism—and this really does apply to Gosport—doctors take matters into their own hands and, in a situation such as that in Gosport, paternalistic decision-making by doctors can become extremely dangerous. Does the Minister agree that we need to bring to an end paternalistic decision-making by doctors without reference to patients’ wishes, particularly in end-of-life care?