My Lords, I support Amendment 12 in particular. It will be no surprise to the Minister that my interest, even my passion, lies in the status of healthcare workers, which is hugely important. We are recognising that even more by the way in which the continuing change in the health service is coming about.
I wish to pick up on the way the Bill reads in the context of the amendment. The clause refers to, obviously, education and training for healthcare workers. It then refers to,
“the provision of information and advice on careers in the health service”,
but to know where your career is going you have to have a start point. The Minister knows that many of us have been asking for, in the first instance, a recognition of the skills that healthcare workers bring to the job. Across any organisation that has opportunities for development, there is always a start point. A healthcare worker would need to know, for instance, what skills they have and what skills they need to go on to the next stage of whatever career they choose. The ambiguity, at best—actually, it is probably even worse than ambiguity—under which healthcare workers currently operate does not help that process. It will be difficult
for the Bill to achieve its objectives if we do not start from the point where healthcare workers have that recognition of their skills in a formal way.