Covid-19: Mental Health Services
Lord Bishop of Coventry Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Coventry
My Lords, at least one of the churches in my diocese recently set up a mental well-being centre, providing support groups, a helpline and signposting to professional services. Has the Minister considered inviting churches and other faith communities, with their knowledge of, trust within and connections to the local community, including networks of young people, to participate in the response to the mental health needs caused by Covid-19?
Lord Bethell [V]
The right reverend Prelate makes a good point, and I thank very much indeed those from all faith groups who have provided important pastoral support during this difficult time. On a practical matter, the funding for the mental health projects from our £5 million fund has gone to 130 different charities through the coronavirus mental health response fund. We are assessing the impact of those and we look forward to the recommendations of the Mind and mental health consortia which are behind that fund.
Covid-19 Update
Lord Bishop of Coventry Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Bethell
To be clear to the noble Lord, the dashboard was made available on 22 June. It has a very large amount of local information, including information from 111, hospitals and the test and trace programme. The analysis of the data will be enhanced using the latest technology in order to give the most granular information possible. Those enhancements will be rolled out very shortly.
The Lord Bishop of Coventry
My Lords, the Minister said that data required by local authorities is given to them, but I am told by the leader of Coventry City Council and our director of public health that, although data sharing has improved over the past two weeks, it still comes from different sources and does not include data on workplaces and other settings that people regularly visit or, as we have heard, on ethnicity. Can the Minister provide further assurances that local authorities will be supplied with the full data that they need to respond to local outbreaks in a streamlined form and at an early point?
Lord Bethell
The right reverend Prelate is right that bringing together data from a very large number of sources is a challenge. One could include social media data, digital tracking data, hospital data and 111 data. We are working on systems that bring all the possible data one could imagine to one place at the joint biosecurity centre. We have made huge strides on that, but there is work to be done, and we are very much focused on it.
Gosport Independent Panel: Publication of Report
Lord Bishop of Coventry Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord O'Shaughnessy
Giving patients and of course their families much more control over the circumstances in which their lives end is clearly the right thing to do. Some very good practice has been going on—for example, Coordinate My Care across London makes sure that somewhere between 70% and 80% of people who would prefer to die at home are able to do so, as opposed to in hospital. However, it is important to emphasise that in this case by and large we are not talking about palliative care; only a small number of the people concerned whose lives were shortened were in a position where they were, in an objective sense, near end of life. Many were in after a fall, a hip replacement or something else from which they could easily have recovered and lived for many more years. That is the tragic fact. So, while I agree with the noble Baroness, it is important that we do not view the tragedy just in those terms; unfortunately, it is much broader.
The Lord Bishop of Coventry
My Lords, like others, I was very moved by Bishop James Jones’s foreword and the way that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, put it, the panel thought to listen to and heed the concerns of those who have been aggrieved. I have been impressed by the methodology, I suppose, of the independent panel and the way it has done exactly as the Minister says: seek to work closely with the families and, so far as I understand, build its terms of reference from the particular concerns of the families, the aggrieved and the victims—the sort of questions they are wanting to ask. Have the Government made any assessment of whether independent panels are more effective than judge-led inquiries at not only excavating the truth in historic cases but, in so doing, thereby attending to the trauma of the bereaved?
Lord O'Shaughnessy
The right reverend Prelate makes a very incisive point about not only the personal qualities of Bishop James Jones in chairing this panel, with the great compassion, understanding and patience that he has displayed, as indeed has the panel, but about the methodology, as the right reverend Prelate put it, which has been non-confrontational, independent and family-focused. Unfortunately, we grapple with these problems across government from time to time, and this methodology gives us a new way of doing things. It will not be appropriate in every circumstance—something smaller or swifter might be required; equally, it might be something that requires a judicial element—but it gives us a different way of doing things that provides a very sympathetic and compassionate way of listening to families and a way to get closer to the truth.