NHS and Social Care Commission — House of Commons, 2016-01-28
Topic: Health
Valerie Carol Marian Vaz (Labour, Centre-left): It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who is a great defender of the NHS, both locally and nationally. I congratulate the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who was a very assiduous Minister; my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who is not in her place but who was an assiduous shadow Minister; and the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), who unfortunately cannot be here but who was also an assiduous Minister and a member of the Health Committee It is with great difficulty and a bit of sadness that I say that I do not support the motion. I know that it comes with great heavyweight backing from public figures—MPs and former Ministers—but I do not think that it will take the debate forward. When we set up a commission, it can feel like we are kicking something into the long grass, and that is what it feels like we are doing today. This issue has been going on for a long time, and it is, I feel, a lack of political will that is failing to drive the changes forward We have had the evidence. There has been a pilot scheme, which was set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) in Torbay in 2009. The integrated care trust is operating. A former Secretary of State for Health, Stephen Dorrell, who was a very good Chair of the Select Committee on which I served, gave an interview on 22 January in The House magazine in which he recalls asking an adviser: "What is the oldest quote from a health minister saying how important it is to join up health and care services?" This answer came back: "Dick Crossman, the Health Secretary in the late 1960s." That is how long this issue has been going on, and it has cross-party support I want to touch on what some hon. Members have been saying about cross-party support. Perhaps I have been on a different planet, or perhaps, a bit like Bobby in "Dallas", I have woken up and it is all a dream, but I recall being on a cross-party Health Committee, ably chaired by Stephen Dorrell, that produced many reports, but never a minority report. We came up with a number of conclusions that Members are now saying that we should consider In our report on public expenditure, we said that very little of the money spent by the NHS on people with long-term conditions was spent in an integrated way, which meant that significant amounts of money were wasted. In our report on commissioning, we said the NHS Commissioning Board should work closely with local commissioning bodies "to facilitate budget pooling and service integration to reflect patient priorities." In our 12th report of the 2010-12 Session on social care, we said that efficiency savings would not be possible without further integration between health and social care. That has been an aim of successive Governments, but has not been properly achieved In our 11th report of the 2012-13 Session, "Public Expenditure of Health and Social Care", we said that "health and wellbeing boards and clinical commissioning groups should be placed under a duty to demonstrate how they intend to deliver a commissioning process which provides integrated health, social care and social housing services in their area" and that there was "evidence, for example, that 30% of admissions to the acute sector are unnecessary or could have been avoided if the conditions had been detected and treated earlier through an integrated health and care system." In our seventh report of the 2013-14 Session, "Public Expenditure on Health and Social Care", we said that "fragmented commissioning structures significantly inhibit the growth of truly integrated services." In our second report of the 2014-15 Session, "Managing the care of people with long-term conditions", we said that "in many cases commissioning of services for LTCs remains fragmented and that care centred on the person is remote from the experience of many" and that an integrated approach was necessary to relieve pressure on acute care Members of the Health Committee, including the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) and my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who unfortunately had to leave this debate to go to a young carers’ meeting in her constituency, have all sat through that evidence. I know it is real, because it will be on the website of the Health Committee. There are pages and pages of evidence on where we can get things right In particular, our report on "Social Care" said: "Although the Government has ‘signed-up’ to the idea of integration, little action has taken place... The Committee does not believe that the proposals in the Health and Social Care Bill will simplify this process." We called for a single commissioner with a single pot of money who would bring together the different pots of money and decide how resources would be deployed One thing we did as part of our inquiry into health and social care was to visit Torbay, which has not been mentioned today, where we saw integrated care in action. Mrs Smith, who is fictitious but could be any one of our constituents, has one point of contact: she only has to make one phone call. Mrs Smith has seamless social care up to the health service and back again. The health service workers have been upskilled and can help her through the whole system. The local authority and the local hospital worked together so that when Mrs Smith is unwell and has to go to hospital, she can be tracked through the whole system. That is integrated care in action in Torbay. One concern was what would happen and whether such integrated systems would work under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, but I have seen it working There is another interesting area where integrated care is working. Another visit we made was to look at integrated care in Denmark and Sweden. In Denmark, we saw the most fabulous building in which elderly people could be cared for, and where they could be visited by GPs. It looked more like a hotel than a home. We were told, "We are looking at your system. We are looking at Mrs Smith." At that point, we nearly fell off our chairs, because we had come to Denmark to find out how its system works.