I welcome the Bill, and I particularly welcome its aims and objectives to provide the best possible health and care to everyone in this country. However, to achieve that, things must change in the legislation. It must have explicit provisions for mental health, not just physical health. It must also include provisions for children’s social care, not just adult social care, and provide for the commissioning of not just medical services, doctors, nurses, infrastructure and hospitals but medicines and devices, which we know have been crucial in the fight with covid.
How are we going to do that? First, we need to include parity of esteem clauses—one for mental health and one for social care. We need to define what we mean
by parity of esteem, which will be a first: what are we going to put in? Not just money; what processes will we promise to deliver? What healthcare outcomes are we looking to deliver? We need the same for mental health and social care—both are deserved.
As others have said, we need a proper workforce plan, but it must cover not just health but social care, and it must look specifically at how we will deal with recruitment. How will we deal with the career path in future? How will we look at training and retention for the future? There should be an integrated plan, not one for health and one for care. Our nurses, for example, work across both systems.
We need to provide for the commissioning of medicines and devices. Currently, it is a postcode lottery. The previous legislation on medicines and devices covered licensing, but not commissioning. Patient choice depends upon forming that system so that everyone gets access to the medicines approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Currently, that is not the case.
We must positively review the big-picture strategy. What do we need? What are the skills we need for health and care? We must look broadly, not narrowly. We must look at what greater role our pharmacists can play. How can we improve our training so that people have more general skills that we can use in a pandemic such as this, so that everyone in the health system can be used? To support that, we will need to rework the membership provisions for the ICBs and the ICPs. We will need to amend the data regulations to ensure that they can go beyond the boundary of the NHS, and we will need to look at our medicines directory—the sister of the devices registry—to ensure that it includes information from research through to patient experience. There is much to do; it can be done. Where there is a will, there is a way.
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