Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will be able to break away from his brief and accept this amendment, because it is critical. As my noble friend Lord Walton has pointed out, the first part of the amendment talks about physical and mental health, but the second part implies that prevention, diagnosis and treatment are of illness, and there is a real danger of reading that as physical illness. The most tragic situation is where physical illness is misdiagnosed as mental illness or mental illness is misdiagnosed as physical illness. The consequences of that for patients can be disastrous. In primary care, patients present with a completely undifferentiated picture. The general practitioner has to start from scratch, sort out the different parts and then refer to or consult other parts of the service, as appropriate, if he needs to. My noble friend Lady Meacher suggested that those services are in imbalance, and I agree with her that there is a danger when funding is short that you will lose the mental health component of services and that the culture change that this Bill is meant to bring about will not happen. A culture change is needed. Stigmatising labels have been attached to people with mental illness for many years. People with learning difficulties do particularly poorly in services overall. If we are going to take the opportunities of this Bill, we have one with this amendment: to flag up that there are mental and physical components to illness that need and deserve accurate diagnosis, the one as much as the other, that they are interrelated, that one affects the other and that we cannot provide a comprehensive health service without due regard to the totality—to the holistic person who is the patient in front of us.