Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, integration has been a consistent theme throughout our debates on the Bill and the noble Lord, Lord Warner has made a number of highly informed speeches on this topic, as indeed have many in your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, made a powerful case for taking action for further integration. There is no disagreement between us on this. It is why the Government have already taken a number of steps to do precisely what he is asking and I name a selection only. We have put duties on commissioners to promote integration. We are creating health and well-being boards, bringing together health and social care commissioners and their representatives—one of the main manifestations of joined-up thinking in this Bill. We are strengthening the duties in relation to pooled budgets. We are placing specific duties on Monitor to support integration and tabling an amendment prior to Report giving Monitor express power to do that. We are working with the Future Forum, the King's Fund and the Nuffield Trust in a whole range of non-legislative measures. This is not as the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, put it, something the Government have put into the ““too difficult”” box. We are determined that we need to tackle this. I hope no one in your Lordships' House is left in any doubt about our commitment in this area. There are numerous examples of the non-legislative things we are already doing. We agreed with the Future Forum's recommendations that the board should produce commissioning guidance for CCGs that focuses on how to meet the needs of different groups of people who may have multiple problems such as the frail elderly. By April 2012 the department will put in place new metrics that bring together existing data on patients' experiences at the interface between services. We are working with the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement to identify and spread examples of good practice in local measurement and improvement of pathways of care. Through the NHS operating framework for 2012-13 we are asking all PCTs to work with their local authority partners to look at how integration can be better achieved. I have a whole string of other examples. As I have said, the commitment of the Government in this area should not be doubted. I was very pleased to see the King's Fund and the Nuffield Trust in their report to the Future Forum recognising that, "““integrated care lies at the heart of””" this Bill, "““to put patients first, improve health outcomes and empower health professionals””." That is exactly right. While there is clearly work to be done to make this a reality, the Bill will, for the first time, create duties for NHS bodies to promote and encourage the commissioning and provision of integrated services. It is a difficult concept to define. While the noble Lord, Lord Warner, is to be congratulated on the attempt he has made in his amendment, my fear is that the amendment will not actually take us very far. The precise term ““integration”” is used only in headings in the Bill and the concept of integration is applied in a number of different contexts so a fixed definition of this kind may not be appropriate in every case. It may be too narrow in some cases—some noble Lords have alluded to that point. It is also a somewhat circular definition, referring as it does to integration meaning the delivery of integrated care. That serves to illustrate the real difficulties with this approach. I am not convinced that it is necessary to try to describe what integration means. Integration is a broad concept. It could encompass a range of measures. As the recent King's Fund and Nuffield Trust report noted, "““integrated care means different things to different people. At its heart, it can be defined as an approach that seeks to improve the quality of care for individual patients, service users and carers by ensuring that services are well co-ordinated around their needs””." Yes that is right and the duty on the board in new Section 13M is absolutely consistent with that approach. We were very grateful to the Future Forum for its recent work on integrated care. We welcome its recommendation that the entire health and social care system should share a clear and common understanding of the value of integration as a means of putting patients at the centre of their care. However, it was also clear that rather than being an end in itself, integration is, "““a means to achieving better outcomes for people””." That is surely right. There must be the scope for integration to be adaptable to the needs of local communities and individual patients. The noble Lord's definition holds, "““improving the delivery of integrated care and treatment to individual patients””" as the objective in itself when improving outcomes and reducing inequalities should be the ultimate objectives. Very recently, I was advised of a paper produced by the World Health Organization in 2008, Integrated Health Services - What and Why? It starts off by stating that integrated health services mean different things to different people. It lists a whole variety of interpretations of what integrated healthcare means and says that it is in essence very difficult to boil these things down to a definition that is going to please everybody. It also casts doubt—I do not want to make too much of it—on the empirical base for claiming that integration is the answer in every set of circumstances. In making that point, I do not want to imply that the Government are anything other than fully committed to integration, because we certainly are, but the paper's conclusion is: "““'Integration' is used by different people to mean different things. Combined with the fact that this is an issue which arouses strong feelings, there is clearly much scope for misunderstanding and fruitless polarization””." For the World Health Organization to come to that conclusion tells a story. In drafting the various duties and powers in relation to integration, we have consciously avoided a fixed definition to allow for a measure of flexibility and innovative thinking. We have focused on the purpose—the ““why”” rather than the ““how””. I recently met front-line staff when I visited the NHS on the Isle of Wight to look at how they were delivering an efficient, integrated, urgent care service. I made a point of asking them whether they thought that a definition of integration in the Bill would be helpful. I received a resounding no in response. They felt that something like that would stifle their ability to apply fresh thinking and to come up with inventive solutions of their own as to how best to provide integrated care. We are clear that we should not put clinicians, who know the needs of their patients best, in a straitjacket by defining integration in the Bill. Clearly, it will be important that the board and CCGs are held to account for delivering against these duties. They are already required to set out in their annual reports how they have exercised their functions, including how they have met the various duties placed on them. Amendment 38C also makes particular reference to the board and Monitor developing tariffs that will support integration. On that point, I reassure the noble Lord that the duties on the board and Monitor to promote integration would apply in relation to their functions in relation to the tariff. The clauses on the tariff allow a high degree of flexibility for the board to adopt different approaches to tariffs, including ““bundles”” of services or pathways, and we are committed to extending these. They also allow scope for local flexibility in how the rules are applied where necessary. The noble Baroness, Lady Wall, provided considerable insight into what is needed here. Perhaps it would be helpful if I gave an example of a pathway tariff. In 2012-13, we are introducing a ““year of care”” tariff for funding cystic fibrosis services, developed with the support of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. This includes all the care for cystic fibrosis patients for a whole year. The price is broken down into different ““bands””, depending on the complexity of the patient. The tariff will cover the care undertaken by specialist centres and local hospitals, but it will be paid only to the specialist centre thereby promoting better joint working between specialist centres and local hospitals. We are confident that the board, with support from Monitor, will continue to develop and increase the scope of bundled service tariffs where it is clear that tariff design of that kind is appropriate and will deliver benefits to the patient. Under the proposed system, Monitor and the board will have to agree elements of the tariff with each other at all stages. The methodology would be subject to consultation and capable of independent review to ensure transparency and fairness. In addition, under Clause 119, the board and Monitor are specifically required, in developing standard specifications of services for the purposes of the national tariff, to have regard to whether this could have an adverse impact on the provision of services. I hope that that provides sufficient reassurance to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that the emphasis on integration is there, but that he will accept that trying to pin down in words what it should look like may be counterproductive. This is not an argument about the Government's commitment to integration or what we are doing on the ground to achieve it; it is an argument about a specific mechanism designed to achieve it. I think that it is a mechanism that is ill-advised. I hope that the noble Lord will agree to withdraw his amendment.