General Medical Council: Internal Guidance
Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, my noble friends should come to a gentlemen’s agreement on who is going first.
NHS: Allocation of Financial Resources
Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, we will hear from the Conservative Benches and then the Cross Benches.
Baroness Manzoor (Con)
My Lords, I very much welcome the significant sums of money that have been put into the NHS to date by the Government. It is not just increases in beds that we need in hospitals. We live in an age where we have made significant inroads and innovation in technology, diagnostics and so forth, including artificial intelligence. Will my noble friend the Minister say how new technologies are being used to ensure that patients are not needing the extra beds in hospitals and creating the old mistakes we know of?
Adult Social Care
Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Noble Lords
Lord Bradley (Lab)
My Lords, I too was a member of the Select Committee. One of the other key recommendations of our report was the establishment of a commissioner for care and support, to act as a champion for older adults, disabled people and, crucially, for unpaid carers, and that we should prioritise to ensure a review, update and implementation of the Care Act. Do the Government support these proposals?
United Kingdom: Future Pandemics
Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I was just about to confirm that it is the turn of the noble Lord, Lord Browne.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, I am sure that the Minister is aware that it took repeated FoI requests from an NHS doctor to get the Government in 2021 to reveal that they had carried out Exercise Alice in 2016, which was designed to recognise the challenges should a coronavirus hit our shores. The report, redacted when published, revealed shortages of PPE, no plans for pandemic-related travel restrictions, and a failure to have a working contact-tracing system—all of which we had to improvise when it actually happened. Is the department carrying out similar exercises? Is it producing solutions, not just identifying problems? Will the Government publish these reports, so that the public can see what needs to be done to prepare this country?