Health Bill [HL]

In moving Amendment 39, I shall speak also to Amendments 41 and 42. These amendments all have to do with one thing, which is the need for NHS providers, as well as the Government, to make sure that information on quality and performance in the health service is readily available to the general public. One of the best ways of making information available to the public is electronically, through websites; but you have also got to let the public know that those websites exist. We cannot tell doctors, for example, what weblinks to set up with partners in the health service, what notices to pin up in their surgeries, or what leaflets and brochures to have on display; nor can we tell this to public libraries. It seems to me that trusts and secondary providers in the independent sector should be encouraged to broadcast the existence of their quality accounts in this sort of way; in other words, not just in their own waiting rooms but in the community as well. When we talk about the community, we always need to bear in mind the hard-to-reach groups and those who most need to know where best to go for the services that they require. The elderly, the disabled and those with mental health problems all need to be empowered by quality accounts, and ways have to be found of ensuring that they have access to them. This means health providers being especially proactive on behalf of those groups in society. The Government, too, will have a responsibility to ensure that the public know about and can easily access quality data published by the Secretary of State. Amendment 41 endeavours to address a particular issue that is relevant in this context and which I believe to be important. Unless people can relate the information in front of them to some kind of external comparator, its full meaning and significance will not be apparent to them. The danger with a set of quality accounts published at any level, but especially at the national level, is that in setting out information about how a trust, a region or the country as a whole is performing, they may not show to the uneducated reader how creditable or poor that performance is when measured alongside relevant benchmarks. Those benchmarks could be either international comparators or indicators that are evaluated or devised by a body such as NICE and which endeavour to arrive at a gold standard of performance that could put the information contained in quality accounts into a meaningful context. If relevant comparators are not built into the outcome measures contained in quality accounts, there is scope for people to believe that quality is embodied in the performance of the best performing trust in the country. That may not necessarily be so. Equally, it should not be open to the Secretary of State of the day to make out that quality consists of whatever he defines it to be. The system needs to have checks and balances built into it, and I suggest that NICE is probably the body that is best equipped to devise or to validate the comparator measures that are chosen for this purpose. I hope that the Minister will understand what has prompted me to table these amendments. I beg to move.