Medical Innovation Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Lord Winston

Friday 12th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, if it may help my noble friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, referred to the fact that my noble friend could speak to Amendment 13 in its place on the Marshalled List. Therefore we cannot reach Amendment 13 until we have gone through the others.

[Lord Winston]

I am now totally confused but, if I may say so with great politeness, it sounds as if I may not be the only person in the House who is confused. The key thing here, which applies to both these amendments, is the question of patient safety. Amendment 2 argues that wherever “responsible medical opinion” regards that patient safety might be compromised, that needs to be considered in the Bill. That is an important issue and would certainly include the use of stem cells in particular, for the reasons that I have stated.

I was going to refer to a few medical examples where in fact innovations have been done without proper scrutiny. For example, Dr Smith felt that she could inject tuberculin into the spinal cord; the result was in fact disastrous for those patients. The noble Lord, Lord Walton, thought that this was a very good example. What was reported was that the tuberculin recipient had constitutional illness with meningitis, more alarming complications from their nervous system, vomiting, retention of urine, dysphagia, dysarthria, and a whole range of other symptoms which were actually made worse. It was a scandal at the time and a very good example of where, if you have innovation which is not properly controlled, there is serious risk.

I found it quite amusing, by the way, that the lady at Oxford, Dr Honor Smith, was the daughter of a Member of this House. She was the daughter of a Baron—so, technically, she was the honourable Honor Smith. However, I do not think that she ever used that title.

This came up again in the House of Lords later on when the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, supported a quack treatment in 1995 of a Dr William Crofton, which was also for neurological disorders and used something rather similar. One of the problems was that people with these neurological disorders, which as we know are terrifying and untreatable, flock to practitioners in the hope that they may have an unsuccessful condition successfully treated. That is still a real issue for us all in this House.

In response to the honourable Sarah Wollaston, the Member for Totnes, in the other place this week, the Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences at BIS, who was replying on behalf of the Government, mentioned that the Government were determined—let me get the exact quotation for the record, if I can find it in Hansard. In answer to the debate on this Bill, he said:

“I reassure the House that the Government are committed in all this work to putting patient safety first and developing a landscape of evidence-based medicine”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/12/14; col. 850.]

I suggest to your Lordships that the Bill does the reverse. It tends to risk patient safety in certain cases where patients are desperate for a treatment. It will also reduce the chance of evidence-based medicine.

I thought about this long and hard last night. I must tell the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, that I did not sleep last night. I woke at about 1 am, having gone to bed at 12.30 am, and could not sleep for thinking about the Bill. I understand that he has been extraordinarily courteous and very gentle in introducing the Bill. He has also been very helpful in trying to ensure that the Bill is as safe as possible and very good at listening to our concerns. I understand, too, that he has had a great tragedy that has made him feel very strongly about this issue. I fully understand and deeply respect that, and I wanted to tell him something about myself, which he may not know.

When I was not yet nine, my wonderful, amazing, chess-playing, musical instrument-playing, polymath craftsman father died. He had a minor infection that was treated by an innovative antibiotic which was quite inadequate. He then had an innovative removal of a chest drain too early, so that he developed an abscess in the pleural cavity. Finally, within six months he had an innovative operation, which was not evidence-based, in which his brain was opened and an abscess removed. This man of 42 died, leaving my mother desperate and financially destitute. I was the eldest of three children; I had a sister aged four and a brother aged three. My mother was amazingly in love with my father, so I know something of the tragedy of seeing what happens when somebody is destroyed in front of you. I do not take this as an issue that leads me to oppose the Bill—that is not the case at all—but I am very concerned that we should not use innovation where we might compromise patient safety.

One of my concerns is that we often think of the National Health Service as a football. I take strong objection to my own side when it says that it is the only side that wants to support and protect the health service. That is nonsense; we all want to protect the health service and to see a health service that is efficient. Unfortunately—and I say “unfortunately” because I mean it—at the next election, I know that the health service is bound to be something of a political football. These issues are going to come up and therefore I want to make certain that we have the chance to innovate in a responsible way. Ultimately, I am not convinced by the arguments that the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, has put forward. There are cases where treatment that is authentic and should be offered will be compromised in response to patients who are so desperate that they are prepared to try anything which has not been fully, or even partially, tested. For that reason, I beg to move Amendment 2—and I have spoken also to Amendment 13.