Like the shadow Health Minister, we will not obstruct the Bill, because we support the basic aim to control prices in order to achieve a good return to the NHS from the drugs that it uses.
We also support in principle new clause 1. Six months might be a little early technically to bring things together, and there should not be just a single report because we will only see change over time. To look at the success of these actions, we need to see a price being controlled, and to spot when prices are sliding out of control. I would therefore suggest a looking at the data and information on an annual basis and perhaps laying it before Parliament to show that the Bill’s aim is being achieved and that the concerns of the official Opposition are being allayed.
We support amendment 8 because it advocates the same approach that we have in Scotland. While the Cancer Drugs Fund in England is welcome and has clearly helped many patients, it is limited in the sense that if people do not have cancer they cannot access the medicines fund. That means that people with rare diseases are left somewhat abandoned. Frankly, if it were left solely to NHS England, those people would be left in
the desert. It is important that significant money will be released, and the provision could gain support from the pharmaceutical industry if it sees that the money it is returning is enabling innovative medicines to come to the NHS earlier. Sometimes when we compare certain illnesses such as cancer, we find that the gap is in relation to people with more advanced disease struggling to access the newest medicines. If the amendment helps to address that, we would support it.
The Scottish Medicines Consortium was reformed in 2014, and Scotland has now moved up from passing 53% of all applications to 77%, with a further review going ahead at the moment to see how to improve this further. The aim is not to avoid using drugs; the aim is to access them at a decent price. If the pharmaceutical industry is returning money to the NHS, it should enable earlier access.
Amendment 9 was tabled by SNP Members and we put it before the Public Bill Committee. It deals with clause 5, which extends a power that in fact already existed but was never used—to control the price of medical services and medical supplies as well as drugs. I am slightly disappointed that we did not manage to get this amendment adopted, so I raise again the issue of quality control and ask the Government to consult on it.
I know I spoke extensively in Committee about surgical gloves, but they provide a good example in that the range of quality is vast, and if poor quality gloves are used, there is likely to be extra cost to the NHS either when gloves have to be changed two or three times within one operation or more subtly if a surgeon is exposed to blood at the end of an operation from a tiny pinhole that was not visible. The same point applies to gowns and drapes. Taking off a gown that is meant to be protective and discovering that you are soaked to the skin in blood is a pretty unpleasant experience, and it obviously increases the risk to staff. The idea that surgeons are not exposed to diseases such as HIV or hepatitis B and C is naive. I knew colleagues over my career who suffered from those conditions, which they caught from patients. There is clearly a responsibility to staff and to patients to avoid any possibility of cross-contamination. I mentioned in Committee, too, some fairly cheap items such as gauze swabs, because if they are shedding threads, it can lead to intra-abdominal infection—something that we do not want. This amendment is about consultation and looking further at the mechanism.
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In Scotland, we have the national procurement and logistics system, which takes right to the ward level a sort of Amazon-style system whereby the ward will order the medical supplies it needs, and they will be picked from 9,000 items held by national procurement and delivered by national logistics all the way to the ward. The supply chain, as it is called in England, has 600,000 items, which suggests that Professor Carter’s proposal to limit what is used and to look more at procurement is not yet happening. We need to ensure that that comes about, and it would probably be the point at which quality could be assessed. Anything going into the supply chain list would be rigorously tested by staff, with feedback, and it would be for a national procurement group to decide whether to stock it.
Finally, our amendment 10 is designed to focus on the sharing of information that is going to be collected by the Secretary of State, ensuring that any such data that relates to the devolved Administrations—essentially, their data—is freely accessible to them. The Minister mentioned the memorandum of understanding, and I would like to hear where we are with that and whether it will mean real-time access to a database that would be given to authorities listed here or whether they would have to put in a request. It is vital to provide data to the devolved Administrations when they request it, and not on some fixed annual date chosen by the Secretary of State. If those Administrations perceive that there is an emerging problem, they can then deal with it. Having been involved in clinical data collection, I know that there is nothing more frustrating for a team than to be doing the work to gather data, but having no option to access the data when it needs to interrogate them. I simply ask the Minister again to clarify where we are with the memorandum of understanding. I would welcome his commitment to this as we go forward.