NHS Redress Bill [HL]

Amendment No. 24, as I understand it, provides that those bodies that may be placed under the duty in Clause 5(1) to consider the potential application of the redress scheme would be restricted to independent bodies. That would restrict the duty to identify cases that may be eligible for the scheme to organisations independent of the scheme. We believe that scheme members are best placed to identify cases where mistakes may have been made at local level, by reviewing complaints, adverse incident reports, and cases arising through clinical governance procedures. That is the right way forward, if we are trying to change the culture of the NHS in this area—as seems to be the general wish. The intention behind Clause 5 is to place duties on the providers and commissioners of care who may be investigating adverse incidents, or considering complaints about hospital healthcare, and to require those bodies, when such cases were being considered, to also consider whether cases are eligible for the redress scheme. The amendment would prevent such bodies being required to consider eligibility for the redress scheme. The amendment would require independent bodies to identify eligible cases under the scheme, but with the possible exception of the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection—in other words, the Healthcare Commission—it is difficult to see how the independent bodies could be expected to identify cases that may be eligible for the scheme, other than on the basis of application. I gently suggest to the noble Baroness that the amendment would take us backwards. We have set our cap against the idea of an application scheme because we want the offending bodies and their staff to identify the grievances that need to be addressed and produce them to be considered—but when they do that to notify the patients and still leave it open to the patients to apply for action. To set a poor old independent body, if I may put it that way, under some slightly mysterious duty created by the amendment to discover all those cases seems a rather impracticable way forward. It is difficult to see how in practice they would discharge that obligation other than relying to a great extent on patients applying to a particular body. We have already discussed the issue of whether there is a ready candidate to be an independent body; certainly, the approach in the amendment would damage the whole purpose of the scheme, which is to get the body responsible for the incident that has caused difficulty for the patient to face up to the adverse incident and do something about it, including making redress. So it would shift the responsibility away from the NHS, when the Bill currently places the obligation fairly and squarely on the NHS bodies.