My Lords, this is a large group of amendments relating to expert registries. I have Amendments 95, 99, 100 and 101 and support the others in this group.
First, I welcome Clause 16, which the Government added during the Bill’s passage in the other place. The clause is a clear step in the right direction. Amendment 95, like Amendment 96, would build on this to ensure efficacy by tracking the use, and the outcomes from the use, of all medical devices rather than just a select few. We must not forget the conclusions of the Cumberlege review that registries are too
“few and far between and all too often prompted by catastrophe”.
The Bill provides a prime opportunity to move away from that position. Without tracking all devices, we will allow another scandal, involving an as-yet-unknown device, to emerge undetected until many have been affected. A proper warning system is essential.
Amendment 99 seeks to make the list of objectives for regulations listed under Clause 16(2) mandatory rather than permissive. These should be minimum standards against which to hold any regulations the Government publish, not just aspirations.
Amendments 100 and 101 then seek to add to that list of standards. In doing this in Grand Committee, I would welcome some commitments from the Minister, setting out where the Government share the objectives in those amendments. In essence, the difference between the Government’s approach and mine is that the Government foresee a future in which some medical devices continue not to be tracked, hoping that their outcomes will be audited. I strongly believe that this is a mistake.
Registries, which track patient outcomes through proper monitoring and audit, are an essential component of post-market surveillance and a prerequisite for patient safety. They should be the rule, not the exception. This is a principle that the Royal College of Surgeons of England strongly supports too. Indeed, its former president, Professor Derek Alderson, made this clear in his evidence to the review of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. As he put it
“a registry of its own right does not create patient safety; it’s just a list. The registry must contain information that can be audited”.
Essentially, as the Cumberlege review acknowledges, a registry is a registry only if it contains patient outcomes, which are then subject to expert oversight. To that end, Amendment 100, which is at the core of this group of amendments, sets out the following principles.
First, the use of all implantable devices should be recorded in a registry. That goes to the heart of the issues explored by the Cumberlege review and is surely
the central lesson that must be learned from the unnecessary—and unnecessarily long—suffering of thousands of women whose experiences with mesh were horrific.
Secondly, other devices used in the course of operations should similarly be subject to outcomes tracking. I raise this in particular because it is not just devices left inside people that can later cause problems. We know, for example, that machines used in the heating and cooling of blood during open heart surgery can cause a Mycobacterium chimaera infection. The NHS now warns people of this risk, but it seems clear that the Bill should put in place measures to ensure that the use of particular machines is tracked, and that where infections develop later, a flag can be raised against that machine. To be clear, the machines involved do not actually make contact with the patient or their blood. The heater-cooler units contain two water tanks and tubing. One water tank uses warm water, which, through indirect thermal transfer, keeps the patient warm during the surgical procedure, often through the use of a warming blanket. The second water tank contains cold water, used, again indirectly, to cool the cardioplegic solution that slows or stops the patient’s heart to allow the surgical procedure to proceed. It is thought that where Mycobacterium chimaera develops in these machines, it can escape as aerosol—a fine spray—into the surgical area and thus cause infection from there. I raise the example simply to illustrate that medical devices are not only about what is left inside people, or even what comes into contact with people. The new provisions for information systems need to be flexible in recognising that.
The third provision of Amendment 100 is that information systems must be subject to expert oversight. That is to deal with the central point raised by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which is that without this oversight a registry is just a list—not really a registry at all. A good example of a registry in action is the National Joint Registry, which is overseen by a steering committee of experts. The expert committee monitors outcomes achieved in joint replacement surgery, analysing procedures by brand of prosthesis, hospital and surgeon. Instances where performance falls below expected levels are highlighted to ensure appropriate investigation and follow-up. This is a standard we need to see replicated across surgical specialities and across the NHS.
Fourthly, and perhaps most critically, the amendment seeks assurances from the Minister that information systems set up under the Bill will provide a direct route for patients to report their own outcomes. Clinicians, of course, want to assume the best about the treatment they have commissioned and undertaken for a patient. It is a natural and not ignoble instinct to try to reassure a patient who presents with a problem following a procedure. There is human nature in a clinical transaction. When a problem emerges, patients are often reassured that they “need to give it more time” or “things will settle down”. Each GP may see only one or two patients who have been subject to a particular device or procedure. With follow-up appointments decreasing, these patients with problems can become invisible to secondary care. Yet
the patients know that they feel worse, feel that they are not being properly listened to and speak to others in online communities, discovering a specific pattern of concerns.
The yellow-card notification scheme is greatly underused, and patients do not know how to self-report on it. For that reason, we need two ways for information to reach a registry. We hope that a majority will be tracked from patients, through clinicians. Where there are multiple instances of concerning outcomes, these should be flagged through expert monitoring, but there must be a failsafe for patients to approach the holders of the registry directly to have their outcome reported and considered in its monitoring. The fourth limb of Amendment 100 seeks to achieve this objective and Amendment 101 reflects the same principle. Together, the measures in Amendments 100 and 101 seek to implement this key conclusion of the Cumberlege review:
“A central patient-identifiable database should be created … This can then be linked to specifically created registers to research and audit the outcomes in terms of both the device safety and patient reported outcomes measures.”
That surely is the goal to which we must all aspire.
I want finally to address Amendment 104, to which I have added my name. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, draws attention to the balances we have to get right in collecting all this data in the name of patient safety. As I said on a previous group of amendments, I hope and expect that dealing with consent to recording this data could and should be dealt with as part of shared decision-making between the clinician and the patient at the point of agreeing to a procedure. Of course, it should be open to a patient to have a procedure without the data being recorded, but they would have to be made aware of the increased risk to their own health if problems with a device used in the operation were later to arise.
I have sought to reflect this point in Amendment 100 by making clear that collecting data should be subject to patient consent. None the less, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, offers another way to deal with the issue by putting in the Bill that regulations under Clause 16 should have regard to the Caldicott principles. I do not see how the Minister could argue with that and I hope he will be able to give a positive response.
This group of amendments is designed to assist the Government and to catalyse faster movement on their part. I understand that Ministers see tracking and auditing the outcomes from the use of all medical devices as the right direction of travel, but as yet we do not have a destination or an estimated time of arrival. We need to hear both from the Minister this afternoon. I beg to move.