Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-10-16
Topic: Health
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): I start by welcoming you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an absolute pleasure to speak for the first time under your chairmanship on a sitting Friday, and it will be a great pleasure to do so again in the Fridays to come. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) on bringing forward this interesting Bill, on which we have had a good debate already. It would also be remiss of me not to welcome the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) to her position under the new regime in the Labour party. I am sure she will do a splendid job, and I wish her every success in doing it I have been contacted by constituents about the Bill, both in opposition to and support of it. It seems to polarise opinion; people seem to be either very for it or very against it in a way that is not always the case with Bills. I want to outline some of the points brought to my attention, many of them by my constituents. I understand that the Bill aims to help doctors to develop safely and responsibly innovative treatments and cures for cancer and other diseases, and that the rationale behind it, as my hon. Friend seemed to confirm, is that the promotion of such medical innovation could lead to the development of new cures and more effective treatments for patients To that end, the Bill has two aims: to provide a regulation-making power to enable the creation of a database of innovative medical treatments and to enable doctors to access information on this database; and to provide an option for doctors who innovate to take steps in advance to show that they are acting responsibly, not negligently—which deals with some of the concerns already expressed. It specifically states that it would not apply to the use of treatments in research, thereby keeping that distinction, but rather would support innovation in the treatment of individual patients, while preserving the existing common law safeguards for patients. By bringing forward the legal test of negligence to the point of treatment, it allows doctors to remove the barrier of the fear of litigation when using innovative techniques and working in a manner held as largely responsible. Those all strike me as worthy sentiments, and it is difficult to see why anyone would be against them in principle The Bill cannot be seen in isolation from its origin and progression in Parliament. As my hon. Friend made clear, the Bill stems from Lord Saatchi’s Medical Innovation Bill, introduced in the last Parliament, which, it is important to mention, arose from Lord Saatchi’s personal experience of losing his wife to a rare cancer. I think, therefore, that we can all appreciate, and should be mindful of, the Bill’s intention, which was to try and prevent that from happening to other people. It aimed to provide a standard for the legal position surrounding innovation, hoping, in theory, to encourage doctors to use innovative techniques, confident that their good intentions would not be lost In taking up issues with the NHS on behalf of constituents, I have often seen its fear of litigation. That might apply if I take up a complaint about one of my local hospitals—I have very good local hospitals, but of course everybody makes mistakes and things do not always go according to plan. Sometimes responses from the NHS can be very defensive, not because it does not appreciate that something has gone wrong, but because it fears the consequences of admitting that something has gone wrong. We should always do what we can to try to help the NHS from that fear of litigation. Anything seeking to do that would be very worthwhile.