Unfortunately due to high time pressure on the Parliamentary schedule, this is a highly truncated version of the speech I intended to deliver. I have therefore copied the original written transcript of my full speech below, for those constituents who would like to hear my thoughts on this vital long-term plan in more detail:
**This is a written transcript and does not reflect the speech as it was delivered. Please watch the video above for my speech in the House of Commons**
Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure as always to talk in a debate about the NHS, still one of the great symbols of our shared national identity. I am glad to be able to stand today and talk about a long-term Conservative plan to protect this British institution and, vitally, equip it for the healthcare challenges that we face in the future.
I think before I begin it is important to highlight some things that are often forgotten in this Chamber. The NHS remains free at the point of need to all. It remains a public body that is publicly funded to record levels. And it remains one of the most respected and envied national systems of healthcare in the world. This Government has consistently listened to and responded to Members of this House and healthcare professionals and rarely has it been credited for doing so. This Ten Year Plan represents the next stage of that process of engagement and responsiveness and is the latest in a string of measures by this Government to support and improve our NHS.
And I do not deny that improve is a word that certainly applies to the NHS. Our population grows and ages at record rates; treatment costs soar as we discover new but expensive ways to address previously untreatable diseases; and as we saw with the hack in 2017, critical public infrastructure will be targeted in an increasingly digitised world. How can a body of the size and complexity of the NHS not be forced to improve in such a challenging and dynamic landscape?
Unfortunately, my own area of Worcestershire is one of the areas feeling these challenges most keenly. We have a relatively elderly population and a rural transport infrastructure. Our Acute Hospitals are under immense pressure, with 10,500 A+E visits in January alone and an overnight bed occupancy rate of 93.7%. This fits into the wider national trend of a 28% increase in hospital admissions over the last decade and an NHS in England that deals with 1.4 million patients every 24 hours. Healthcare at the national and even regional scale is a herculean task that requires long-term planning and funding security.
This is where the Ten Year Plan comes in. A £20.5 billion cash increase, funding on primary and community care increasing by £4.5 billion a year by 2023/24 and an ambitious target to make sure that, in ten years’ time, 55,000 more people will survive cancer each year and 100,000 heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases will have been prevented.
Worcestershire is already seeing the benefits of the new financial framework. In January our largest hospital, the Worcester Royal, opened a new 28-bed ward and a link bridge to connect it to the rest of the hospital. Further additional capacity in Worcester and Redditch is planned this year as Government funding flows increase. For an Acute Trust that has been operating under special measures with NHS Improvement since December 2015 and one that is still forced to cancel many operations, these kind of positive trends in capacity and capability cannot be overstated.
And this is not just a long-term plan for acute hospital care. In fact we have heard from the Minister that the core principle of this plan is that prevention is better than cure. This sounds obvious but reveals a recognition that hospital funding is not the only way of easing pressure on the health service. Patients’ first point of contact and how their ailment is dealt with at that point is critical to how much or how little strain they put on the wider system as their treatment moves forward.
Rapid Access Diagnostic Centres are an excellent addition to the NHS and will provide a clear and easy route to diagnosis for those who fear they have the symptoms for diseases such as cancer. In such situations, a quick diagnosis could be vital and centres dedicated to ensuring that no one falls through the cracks for too long will have huge benefit. Equally, the “pharmacy first” principle that will look to increase the roles that pharmacies play in addressing minor ailments will take a lot of strain off GPs. It is alarming that the equivalent of 2,325 annual full-time GP salaries is wasted every year by people not turning up to appointments and I suspect that most of this is caused by people with the slightest ailments.
The South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning area has 31 GP surgeries, 24 of which offer full provision, for over 305,000 registered patients. I am happy to report that 88% of patients in our area are happy with their GP services, which I can proudly say is above the national average, but it is still the case that each surgery in South Worcestershire has an average of about 10,000 patents. And I can assure you that most Worcestershire GP surgeries are at the smaller end of the scale. The measures taken in the Ten Year Plan to boost primary services with £4.5 billion in additional funding each year, new diagnostic centres and an emphasis on the role of pharmacies will therefore be positively felt in GP surgeries across South Worcestershire and by the patients who truly need them.
One thing the focus on primary care will help is the battle against the growing rates of mental health issues, particularly in young people. We have an excellent Health and Care Trust in Worcestershire that dealt within 100% of crisis mental case cases in children within the target time of a week. This in addition to dealing with over 95% of routine cases within the four week target. But below these figures is an apparatus that needs bolstering as cases rise and demands become more complex. The Government has already laid a strong foundation with the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green paper and I welcome the Ten Year Plan’s further measures that will inject an additional £2.3 billion into mental health funding and give 350,000 more children and 370,000 more adults the support that they need.
It will come as no surprise to colleagues that I want to end by briefly commenting on the modernising digital measures that this plan puts forward. I worked as the Health Secretary’s PPS both when he was the Digital Minister and indeed the Digital Secretary and think it is fair to say that I am as familiar as anyone with his passion for the digitisation of public services. This is a passion we share. The possibilities presented to us by the development of cloud-based systems, AI and algorithmic machine learning are truly staggering. And nowhere is this more evident than in the health sector.
So how does this work and how does it fit into the NHS’ long-term plan? Well perhaps the most exciting technological advancement that the plan raises is the use of artificial intelligence to target high-risk patients for screening for certain diseases. This is where the target figure of 100,000 prevented heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases partly comes from. I also commend the ambitious target that in 5 years’ time everyone will be able to access a digital GP service. I say ambitious because currently only 3% of people in my Clinical Commissioning Area access their medical records online. And far from being a rural irregularity, this is actually bang on the national average. So the Health Secretary is right to identify this as a key area in any long term plan for the NHS.
It has given me great pleasure to hear about the steps being taken locally and nationally to improve the use of technology in public healthcare. I think the Government deserves some credit for this having set such an ambitious and positive tone. I’d like to highlight the work of the South Worcestershire CCG to install the Surgery Connect system last year – a cloud-based telephone service that allows GPs and other healthcare staff to contact patients via a mobile app. It was also pleasing to see in NHS England’s February update that lung cancer scanning trucks are being rolled out across the country that will operate in supermarket car parks and potentially reach 600,000 people over the next four years.
A society is often defined by how it embraces, uses and even advances the technology of its time. This plan shows that technological solutions to clinical problems are at the heart of the Government’s approach to the NHS.
In sum, I think this plan creates a robust and ambitious framework for our health service. I am particularly happy to see the importance afforded to primary care pathways and the recognition of the importance of technology to diagnosis and targeted screenings. These principles combined with record levels of funding will combat the mental health crisis, turn the tide in the fight against cancer and prevent the premature deaths of thousands of British people. I am privileged to lend it my support.
