Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, this is an extremely important group of amendments, but I hope it is, by and large, an uncontroversial one. The Government say they are committed to patient involvement and patient choice. They say they want to see all decisions being taken with the patient rather than simply by professionals. These amendments all contribute to achieving those objectives. It is worth distinguishing between a number of different elements in terms of patient involvement. There is the involvement of the individual; there is the involvement of the specialist group of patients; and there is the collective involvement of patients. I hope that these amendments provide a means of addressing all three groups. The involvement of the individual patient—specifically included in Amendment 121 and in Amendment 124, to which the noble Lord, Lord Patel, has just spoken, on access to medical records—is an example of where it is vital to write this into the Bill if you are serious about the Government’s mantra of, ““No decision about me without me””. The experience is that, where patients are involved in all decisions about their medical care, better decisions are made and compliance with them by patients is far fuller than would otherwise be the case. Therefore, requiring patients to be involved in every decision affecting them is part of delivering a good and effective health system. My experience mirrors that of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, because the experience of patients’ organisations is that, where patients are given charge of their medical records, they look after them extremely carefully—often much more carefully than under the old system of trolley-loads of not dog-eaten but dog-eared files in hospitals—and are much more likely to be protected by the individuals concerned. I have put my name to Amendments 123, 192 and 205, which talk about the involvement of healthwatch organisations. Amendment 123 places a duty on the board to promote the involvement of local healthwatch, and it is important that the board sets the tone for the NHS in the way in which healthwatch organisations are expected to be involved at every level. It needs to come from that level. Amendments 192 and 205 relate to the duties of clinical commissioning groups. There is a gap in the Bill, because it seems to be implied that commissioning groups will involve patients and healthwatch organisations, but I am not sure that that is stated explicitly, which is why those amendments are so important. However, the reason why it is helpful to engage healthwatch at every level within the NHS is the support function that local healthwatch organisations and HealthWatch England will provide to the three levels of patient involvement that, as I have stated, are so important. That is because, as local healthwatch organisations and HealthWatch England, they will have an understanding of the way in which the health service is functioning. They will have an understanding of the pressures on the health service, commissioning groups and local providers and they can therefore support specialist groups of patients with a particular knowledge of their condition in how to exercise their influence most effectively within the organisation. It is those specialist groups of patients who will be tremendously valuable in improving the quality of service. They will often have far more knowledge about the way in which their condition operates than even the clinicians who support them—maybe not the specialists but general practitioners and so on—because they have that detailed knowledge and experience, day in and day out, particularly when they have a chronic condition that may continue over many years. That involvement is crucial in terms of the quality of decision-making, but it is important that they are supported by organisations such as healthwatch, which will then be able to put a context to the way that the local NHS is functioning. Finally, there is the critical issue of the collective involvement of patients in decisions about the disposition and organisation of health services at a local level. That will be best articulated through local healthwatch organisations. This will be about what best serves the local community and what meets the differing needs within a community. The only simple mechanism by which that can be achieved is through something such as local healthwatch organisations. That is why such involvement must be built into the commissioning process, and the board must lay down how crucial this issue is crucial to the determination of services.