Health Infrastructure Plan

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 30th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

The hon. Gentleman makes his point forcefully but courteously. I will take away what he said and I will write to him.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

May I welcome my hon. Friend’s announcement that the Government are backing Basingstoke’s plan for a new hospital to serve not just north Hampshire but across mid-Hampshire? It has the support of our local council and local residents. However, the 1970s buildings in which my incredible doctors and nurses and chief executive Alex Whitfield work are already creaking at the seams and are very expensive to maintain. What can my hon. Friend do to support the hospital’s bid and to ensure that a new hospital is in place as swiftly as possible, so that the money is not patching up the old but building the new?

[Edward Argar]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. This money will be hugely important to doing exactly what she says: investing in our NHS buildings for the long term, so reducing the reliance on expensive capital repairs.

With this plan, we are also looking to deliver a step change in how we deal with capital in the NHS, which is also hugely important. Instead of stop-start investment, we are looking for a rolling programme of investment to make sure we get those facilities up to standard in order to reduce the day-to-day spend on repairs. I will happily talk to my right hon. Friend about what we can do to ensure that we go through due process as swiftly as possible so that her hospital trust can get on with it.

Learning Disabilities Mortality Review

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

We are looking very carefully at the issue of sleep-ins, and are communicating with social care providers and others. It is important to recognise that we need to support not only the sector as a whole, but the many low-paid workers within it. We will present more proposals on sleep-ins shortly.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

The biggest challenge that many learning-disabled people have is simply making their voices heard. Their legal entitlement to advocacy is not always upheld by health professionals, who often misunderstand that entitlement. Will the Minister look into the commissioning of advocacy services, and, indeed, the understanding of the Equality Act 2010 among NHS staff, to ensure that more learning-disabled people have access to organisations such as Speakeasy Advocacy in Basingstoke, which supports more than 600 people with learning disabilities in north Hampshire, helping to give them the voice that they so badly need?

[Caroline Dinenage]

My right hon. Friend is a fantastic champion for equality issues in her role as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. I take on board everything that she has said, and I will certainly look more closely at the issue that she has raised.

Breast Cancer Screening

Maria Miller Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I do not know the answer to that question, but I will look into it. If we find that the uptake was lower than expected in that age group, it will be a very important clue about something that may have gone wrong, and I am sure that the review panel will want to examine it. The overall uptake rate is about 80%, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we should look into what the rates were in specific age cohorts.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his measured statement, and for all he is doing to ensure that the women affected are given the treatment and support that they need. I particularly welcome his independent review of the NHS screening programme. Will he also be looking at quality assurance programmes more widely within the NHS in relation to screening programmes? It is deeply worrying that the NHS did not identify this error for more than a decade, and there may be a need to review those programmes.

[Mr Hunt]

I am afraid that my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The truth is that we do have a quality assurance programme, and it failed to pick up this problem for far too long. We need to understand why that happened. We think that a single IT mistake was made at the very start of the programme, and we understand that sometimes such mistakes are devilishly difficult to identify. None the less, as was suggested by the hon. Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams), there must have been clues that could have been picked up—or so one would think—and we need to get to the bottom of that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I will absolutely consider the sensible recommendations of that report. People on both sides of the House, such as the hon. Gentleman, who were GPs before being elected do a fantastic job of flying the flag for general practice. We are making some progress. Some 3,157 medical school students have gone into general practice as a specialty—the most ever—but there is lots more work to do.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I very much welcome the additional funding this Government have put into the NHS, but constituents tell me that they can better manage chronic conditions and illnesses if they have consistent care from general practitioners, which is something they find difficult to access in some surgeries in my constituency because of problems with recruitment and retention. What is the Secretary of State doing with his team to make sure we can lessen that problem in future?

[Mr Hunt]

I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. One of the best things about the NHS is that people have a GP who knows them and their family. There is a lot of evidence that that is the best way to manage people with long-term conditions, as she rightly says. The truth is that, for a very long time, successive Governments have not invested as much as they should in general practice. We are trying to put that right, and part of that is flying the flag for what an exciting career general practice is. It is the one part of medicine where doctors have an ongoing relationship with patients and their families over their whole lives, which is very motivating.

Adult Social Care Funding

Maria Miller Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

I cannot comment on that individual case, but if the hon. Lady writes to me about it I will be more than happy to look into it and meet her.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I welcome the Care Quality Commission inspections of care homes in my constituency as it is helping to drive up standards and highlight problems, but many older residents tell me that they want to stay in their own homes for longer. What is the Minister doing to help make that happen?

Oral Answers to Questions

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman that there is no intention to restrict access to vital professions such as the clinical professions in the NHS post-Brexit. We have said many times that we will have a pragmatic immigration policy. The long-term solution is not to depend on being able to import doctors and nurses from anywhere, because the World Health Organisation says that there is a worldwide shortage of about 2 million clinical professionals; we are not the only people facing the challenge of an ageing population.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s words and his deeds in terms of recruiting more doctors and nurses domestically, but as he said, hospitals such as mine in Basingstoke rely on the best and the brightest from around the world. What can he do to make sure that when we need to recruit nurses, in particular, we have the travel permits and work permits available to enable them to move in swiftly rather than having to wait for long periods of time?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point. Nurses are, in fact, on the Home Office’s tier 2 shortage occupation list, and they will remain so for as long as we need them to do so. The bigger issue is that for a long time we have relied on being able to import as many doctors and nurses from the EU as we need to, and that has meant that we have not trained enough people ourselves. That is bad for EU countries and for our own young people.