Junior Doctors Contracts

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The trouble with commissions is that they tend to take rather a long time to come up with their conclusions, and we need to sort out these problems now. That is why the Chancellor promised an extra £3.8 billion for the NHS next year, and why we said that we want 5,000 more GPs working in general practice, which will help out-of-hours services. We have a five-year plan that the NHS has the funding to implement, and that will transform out-of-hospital services. I hope that those developments will address the right hon. Gentleman’s concerns.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his patience and resolution in bringing this matter to a conclusion. Does he share the real sadness that so many of us feel that these wonderful young people who come into the health service to be doctors with such high ideals are caught up in this terribly debilitating and damaging dispute? I ask him to reinforce his efforts to engage and speak directly with junior doctors and the medical profession as a whole and not allow the disruptive behaviour of the British Medical Association to destroy the relationship that we need to have with our doctors.

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is right. There was absolutely no reason to have this dispute, because the things that we are trying to sort out—seven-day care and safer care for patients—are what every doctor wants to happen. Indeed, they choose medicine as a profession from the highest of ethical motives, and we want to support them. I share his sadness that it has come to this, but given that the counter-party in the situation is not willing to budge, we have to take action to remove uncertainty and to do the right for patients and for doctors. I will certainly continue to engage. The new commission headed up by Professor Dame Sue Bailey will also look at wider issues of morale, which will make a big difference.

NHS Reform

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. As part of what I said in my statement, we are looking at how we train doctors. My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) talked about creating a learning culture, and the big change that we need to make is creating a culture in which people feel supported to speak out about any concerns or anything on which they think they can see a way of doing something better. They must not feel that that could threaten their career prospects. We do not have that culture in the NHS at the moment, but we need it if the NHS is to be the world’s largest learning organisation, as I argued in a speech this morning. I think staff are up for it, but it is a big change.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend very much for his extraordinarily embracing response to the Public Administration Select Committee report on clinical incident investigation. We started less than a year ago with the germ of an idea, and it has turned into what amounts to a radical reform of safety investigation in the health service. That is a tribute to him and to the Committee’s witnesses, but it is a tribute to the health service itself that it has embraced the idea, which is a big change that I believe will be transformative.

May I pick up on the Secretary of State’s reluctance to provide special legislation for the immunity of those giving evidence to the new patient investigation body? Will he keep an open mind on the subject? If he wants that body to be truly independent and to have a special status, he should remember that the marine accident investigation branch and the air accidents investigation branch have specific legislation to provide for such immunity. Public interest disclosure protection must not be challenged by freedom of information requests, given that freedom of information has been extended into areas where we never imagined it would go. We have to be specific in legislation that that cannot happen in this instance.

[Mr Speaker]

Too long—I hope the answer will be somewhat briefer.

Maternity Services (Morecambe Bay)

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

No one has done more than the right hon. Lady to try to improve the standard for complaints, with the excellent work she did with Professor Tricia Hart. We are in the process of implementing her recommendations, but as the right hon. Lady knows, with the fifth largest organisation in the world, it is one thing to make a commitment in this place, but another to make it happen on the ground. There is definitely much work to do.

I also agree with the right hon. Lady’s comments about James Titcombe. This is a man who gave up his job working in the nuclear industry to come down to London and work in the CQC so that he could actively be part of the culture change that he wanted to see in the NHS. I do not think anyone could have done more than that. It is truly remarkable.

As the right hon. Lady has mentioned Wales, let me say that we have put 20 trusts into special measures in England and it is inconceivable that there will not be trusts with similar problems in Wales. I urge her to encourage the Labour party in Wales to look at introducing a special measures regime and a chief inspector of hospitals in Wales, because that has had such a powerful effect on improving standards of care in England.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and Dr Bill Kirkup for his excellent report. Let me reassure him and the House that the Public Administration Committee is also preoccupied with the failings of the parliamentary and health service ombudsman in the conduct of these cases. I, too, have met James Titcombe on many occasions and have been extremely impressed by his extraordinary commitment to making sure that he is heard so that so many others can be heard.

May I also point out that the report reeks of the confusion that exists between CQC and the PHSO about what their respective responsibilities are? If we are talking about accountability, what we need is an organisation that is accountable for investigating clinical incidents in the NHS, whether they are down to particular local problems or broader systemic problems—by which we mean not that that is an excuse for what goes wrong; rather, it is so those systemic problems can be put right. I therefore very much welcome what my right hon. Friend has mooted will be the task of Sir Mike Durkin: to look at how that capacity can be developed, in the same manner, perhaps, as the air accidents investigation branch of the Department for Transport.

[Mr Hunt]

Dr Mike Durkin will be delighted that he has been promoted and given a knighthood for his wonderful work on patient safety, but it has not happened yet, even though he certainly deserves it. I thank my hon. Friend for his understanding of the complexity of these issues and the importance of the need for culture change. The work of his Committee has not been to scratch around the surface; it has tried to think hard about the solution. He is absolutely right that we need to end regulatory confusion. We now have a strong CQC, which is doing incredible inspections and is trusted across the system. However, we need a system in which people can get independent external advice quickly, which is why he was right to alert me to the potential of an air accidents investigation branch equivalent. I hope that is something that could be helpful for the ombudsman as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Poulter]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will be pleased that, as part of our winter pressures funding, Dudley received £3.5 million to support the hospital during a difficult winter period. There are now 69 more doctors and 324 more nurses, of whom 29 are extra midwives, working in the area than in 2010.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

12. What discussions he has had with (a) the Haven project in Colchester and (b) NHS bodies in north Essex on the need for continuing funding for support for people with moderate to severe personality disorder.

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Norman Lamb)]

My right hon. and noble Friend the Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for quality responded in February 2014 to correspondence from the client chair of the Haven project about its funding. As I said a few minutes ago, decisions on NHS funding are a matter for local commissioners, but I will invite North East Essex clinical commissioning group to meet to discuss the issue in more detail.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for taking such a close interest in the matter, and for the visit paid by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). Although I understand the huge cost pressures on the CCG, may I invite my right hon. Friend to study the Enable East report, which made a different recommendation on how the unit should be treated? It would be sad to close the leading example among 11 Department of Health pilots, when all the other 10 are being kept open as the lessons learned are so valuable.

[Norman Lamb]

I am very much aware of the work that my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) have done on this. It is interesting that all the other 10 pilots have continued. They are part of NHS trusts. This is the only one run by a voluntary sector organisation. It is an incredibly valuable service. I was struck by the extent to which people said how much they had reduced their hospital in-patient admissions as a result of the incredibly impressive preventive work that this service provides, and I want to look into it further.

Francis Report: Update and Response

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend my right hon. Friend for his statement and thank Sir Robert Francis for his excellent report, which, as the Secretary of State knows, goes to the heart of the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry into clinical incident investigation. It comes as no surprise that we still have severe problems in the NHS. Perhaps the “freedom to speak up” guardian role needs to provide complete legal protection for people speaking up, immunity from freedom of information requests so that the information and the names cannot be exposed maliciously, and the capacity to investigate what is reported to them on a completely independent basis. We look forward to his giving evidence to our Committee.

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his interest in the issue of culture change, including at his local hospital, which I visited last week and where I was pleased to see a change in culture happening, despite some very severe problems. It is excellent that PASC is doing this inquiry, and his suggestions sound very worth while. We will consider them as part of our consultation—in fact I would encourage his Committee to submit them formally, to ensure that we give meaning to these “freedom to speak up” guardians.

NHS Major Incidents

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Declaring a major incident is the decision of the local hospital trusts, and that is right. But it is important that, before they make that decision, they should take proper account of the impact on the rest of the local health economy. That is what every responsible hospital wants to happen, and that applies to the hon. Gentleman’s area as well as everywhere else.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Following the declaration of a major incident at the accident and emergency unit of Colchester hospital, we now await the Care Quality Commission report into that incident, which will be published very shortly. We want the report to tell the truth, but it is harder to tell the truth in a political atmosphere where there are people who want to gloat over these challenges to get votes.

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have spoken to the chief executive of the hospital, and I must say that she and her staff are doing a good job in turning around a very difficult situation. What they want is support. We have issued sensible guidance that tells hospitals that if they declare a major incident, they must take account of the impact on the rest of their local health economy. A responsible Opposition would support such guidance, and not to try to turn it into a political football.

NHS (Five Year Forward View)

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I welcome every word of my right hon. Friend’s statement, not least because his fourth pillar on culture change echoes the work done by the Public Administration Committee on complaints handling and the need for openness. His statement addresses all the needs and challenges we face in north-east Essex: the problems of openness and transparency in the local hospital and the need to transfer more of what the hospital does back to the community providers—to the multidisciplinary providers that need to be in the community. I welcome the £1 billion fund for developing community facilities, but how is he going to persuade the CCGs to transfer some of their commissioning power to these units? A hospital in Harwich, which was built under the last Labour Government, has two operating theatres that have never been used because the CCG, and its predecessor the primary care trust, would not commission services through those facilities.

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his long-standing support for the importance of transparency in driving up standards in health care. He has championed that for his own hospital, which has had particular issues on that front, but also through his role in this House, and he is absolutely right to do so. On his substantive point, we will get CCGs to do what he suggests through the reforms that I have announced, which will encourage them to take a holistic view of the health care received by the patients for whom they are responsible. In particular, we have got to move away from commissioning care piecemeal—commissioning a certain number of hips or a certain number of mental health consultations—and start looking at patients and all their needs in the round. If we commission in that way, we can avoid a number of the human tragedies that have come to light.

Patient Safety

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

First, I will ensure that throughout the system when we have failures in care we are completely transparent about them and do not seek to brush them under the carpet. That is a very important change. Secondly, yes there is pressure on ambulance services, just as there is pressure in most parts of the NHS now, but under this Government our ambulance service is taking 1,000 more people every day on emergency journeys. We should credit it with doing a very good job in difficult circumstances.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend my right hon. Friend for being determined to create a different and more effective safety culture in the NHS, just as in the airline or oil and gas industries. Does he accept that publishing more data is only part of the equation and will not necessarily change attitudes and behaviours, particularly if those data are then gamed at another target? We must tackle attitudes and behaviours at source—in the operating theatre, the GP’s surgery and throughout the whole service—to get that better safety culture.

[Mr Hunt]

As ever, my hon. Friend speaks wisely. The first step is to be open and transparent about where the problems are, and I hope today will be a step in that direction. In the end, however, if we are to change things we must create a learning culture in all our hospitals so that the word goes out from the top down that the management is interested in hearing from staff if they have concerns about safety, because it wants to learn from those concerns and put them right. One of the messages I have been trying to get across is that that does not cost money; it saves money. We spend £1.3 billion a year on litigation and £800 million on adverse events. If we are feeling, as everyone is, a tough climate financially, this is a positive thing to do for that reason as well.

Francis Report

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I believe that the Francis report is becoming a major turning point in the life of our national health service, which is one of our great institutions and is probably treasured above every other institution that the British people hold dear. The Francis report has moved the NHS from being a rather impenetrable bureaucracy into something that is much more fallible, human and compassionate.

The Francis report highlighted the failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and stated that they were very much the result of a failure of leadership. As Francis said:

“The patient voice was not heard or listened to, either by the Trust Board or local organisations which were meant to represent their interests. Complaints were made but often nothing effective was done about them.”

Damningly, he found:

“There is no evidence that the substance of any complaint was ever raised with the Board.”

I shall come back to that point later. He also said:

“Such an approach completely ignored the value of complaints in informing the Board of what was going wrong, and what, if anything, was being done to put it right.”

As Members have been saying, this reflected a culture of denial about failings and complaints not just at Mid Staffs, but across much of the NHS. We know that the problems were wider than this one trust. In a report last year the parliamentary and health service ombudsman, whose office is the responsibility of the Committee that I chair, the Public Administration Select Committee, carried out a survey of 94 trusts from across England and found that only 20% of boards were reviewing learning from complaints and taking resulting action to improve services; less than half were measuring patient satisfaction with the way complaints were handled; and less than two thirds were using a consistent approach to reviewing complaints data. One other finding, from memory, was that only 2% of trusts were considering complaint handling as a strategic issue to consider during a trust board awayday.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Will my hon. Friend share his reaction to the news that the parliamentary and health service ombudsman is taking far more seriously complaints brought to her and instigating far more investigations than two or three years ago?

[Mr Jenkin]

Yes, I welcome that. My Committee works closely with the PHSO, Dame Julie Mellor. I paid a visit to the PHSO’s office in London last week and listened to some of the complaints coming in by telephone. We have a lot to learn from the way she is changing things, but there is a lot we need to do to bring the institution of the ombudsman into the 21st century. My Committee is working on a report to be published shortly, which will make recommendations on that.

The role of boards in the leadership of NHS trusts has not been given sufficient attention. Many boards are changing their practices and improving, but the research that we have been given suggests that the chairman of the board of a trust is the most important person in setting the tone of the organisation. We inherited a system where executives took all the decisions and the role of boards was to oversee. No. In the private sector, the chairman of a company, even the non-executive chairman of a company, is the most crucial person for setting the tone, the values and the atmosphere in the organisation. We need to lay much more emphasis on the leadership of trust boards.

The Francis report prompted the NHS, Government and Parliament to question the prevalent management culture in the NHS, and it is the main reason why we are looking not just at the ombudsman, but doing an inquiry into how complaints are handled not just by the NHS, but by Government Departments and across public services. As part of our inquiry we took evidence from Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of NHS England, and Chris Bostock, head of NHS complaints at the Department of Health.

The ombudsman told us that she found what she called a “toxic cocktail” within some NHS hospitals which combines a reluctance by patients, carers and families to complain, with a defensiveness on the part of hospitals and senior staff to hear and address those concerns. In oral evidence to our inquiry, Sir David accepted that when he said:

“I do think there is a real issue about defensiveness and a lack of transparency in the way that we work”,

and he accepted that complaints are important for learning and improving.

A great deal has been said in this debate about processes, procedures, legal sanctions, rules and accountability, but those are for when things go wrong. What we want in our health service is a culture of listening, understanding, caring, learning and supporting. I shall say a little more about that. Sir David said that the need for openness is not always recognised in the NHS. He went on to say that

“we are publishing lots of data and information and people can connect together through social media and all the rest of it, things are opening out, but the leadership of the NHS…is having difficulty coming to terms with that and”—

a rather nice little understatement—

“is slightly behind it.”

He accepted that that came down to leadership and culture. In a powerful admission from somebody who has been at the heart of the NHS for so long, he said:

“Undoubtedly, in broad terms, the NHS leadership is not equipped to handle some of the big issues that are coming forward, so we need to tackle that leadership. We need to work really hard on the culture of the system overall, because as you are going through that transition the importance of setting the right tone from top to bottom of the organisation is increasingly important…You need to make sure that you are learning the lessons and getting innovation from the system as a whole.”

I am bound to add that, at the end of the session, I asked him about his own leadership. It is a credit to him that he explained that the diagnostic process that NHS leaders go through had been applied to him. He said:

“What it said about me was that first of all I was strong on the pace-setting. Give me a target and I will make it happen…Secondly, the feedback was that I was good at setting out a vision of what the future might look like. My weaknesses were around facilitating and coaching, and actually they are the issues that in a modern NHS will be much more highly prized than perhaps the last one.”

I know that Sir David Nicholson has come in for an awful lot of stick and criticism, but there was a degree of self-knowledge there, and he expressed much regret in front of our Committee for what he had missed.

Francis recommended changes to the law, and the Government are implementing those recommendations. However, I agree with the Select Committee on Health that enshrining duties and standards of care in statute is simply not enough. In fact, statutory changes are almost irrelevant to the day-to-day life of people working in the NHS. The word we hear often is “culture”, and that is what needs to change and is changing. The key change needs to be to attitudes and behaviour within the NHS, particularly among those in leadership positions, who set the tone of the organisation that they lead. Leadership is central to that—not just the leadership of trusts, but leadership across the organisation at all levels.

The Secretary of State is right to emphasise the importance of compassion in the NHS and the need to support those who are required to show compassion every day. Management need to feel and respect that compassion and reflect it in how they treat their staff, otherwise, as one colleague said to me, patients become objects, not people. The way health care staff feel about their work has a direct impact on the quality of patient care as well as on an organisation’s efficiency and financial performance. If those in the upper tiers of management are not also involved in feeling compassion for the patient, they place too great a burden of compassion on front-line staff. The people on the front line need support from those up the management chain, and compassion has to come from the top.

High-quality, patient-centred care depends on managing staff well, involving them in decisions, listening to what they have to say, developing them and paying attention to the physical and emotional consequences of caring for patients. Funnily enough, that point was made by a commercial witness to the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry into complaint handling, Mark Mullen, the chief executive of First Direct. He told us that

“there is a relationship between how you treat your people and how you ask or expect or want your people to treat their customers…it is virtually impossible to create a positive outcome with customers unless you have created a positive relationship with your own employees.”

I wish to leave the House with that serious thought—how NHS staff feel about their work has a direct impact on the quality of patient care, as well as on efficiency and financial performance. That is what this is about.

I am taking a close interest in the NHS leadership academy, which the Secretary of State referred to. It clearly has a clear role to play, although it is very small at the moment. It deals only with potential trust chief executives—senior leadership in challenging roles. It is early days, and we need to involve the academy with trust boards, trust chairs, the leadership of NHS England and even the Department of Health. The academy must give priority to the values of compassion, openness and transparency, listening to and learning from complaints and accepting and learning from failure. It is not about people going off to Harvard, learning how to develop fantastic strategies and coming back with a personal vision that they impose on their organisation. That is not the kind of leadership the NHS needs, and indeed, such leadership does not work in business either. That is true not just for a few leaders, but for every leader of every team in every trust and GP practice in NHS England and the Department of Health. It is a much bigger agenda for the NHS leadership academy than currently envisaged, but we need that ambition if there is to be speedy and permanent change in the culture of the NHS, the attitudes of the people in it, and the way they behave.

There is a great deal of excellent practice in the NHS, as in most large organisations, but it does not seem to be gathered in any systematic way so that learning can be shared. One consequence of that is that there does not seem to be a shared understanding of the kind of leadership that makes excellent practice more likely. Despite the scale and complexity of the health service, there is a common commitment to compassionate, safe, sustainable care among clinicians, managers, trusts, chairs and regulators, which could be the foundation for building a shared understanding of good leadership and practice. None of this will be a quick fix, but many building blocks of good practice are already in place. Gathering that learning together would strengthen and hearten leadership across the NHS. I believe that that is the real role of the NHS leadership academy as it builds its capacity, and I look forward to its developing in the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Poulter]

I will talk about complaints a little later, but the right hon. Gentleman has made some important points. When we consider how to improve the delivery of care in our health service, it is important that we examine international comparisons. The system in New Zealand includes a different form of compensation, and perhaps that is partly why it has a more open culture—there could be many other factors. It is acknowledged much earlier in the process that something has gone wrong, and there is a genuine attempt to explain the situation to the family and say sorry. That is what good health care is all about.

No matter how good, well trained and dedicated staff are, things will sometimes go wrong in a health service. When they do, it is important that we are open and honest with patients and that we do our best to put things right if we can, or explain and apologise if we cannot. That is why we believe that the duty of candour needs to exist at organisational level. Of course, I am happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman, or meet him if he would like to talk through some of the issues that he raised today. He makes good points, and I know that he does so on a completely apolitical basis because he has the best interests of the health service at heart. We might disagree on other issues, but on this one it is worth having a meeting to discuss his views further.

Subject to the passage of the Care Bill, a new criminal offence will be introduced to penalise providers who give false or misleading information where that information is required to comply with statutory or other legal obligations. It means that those directors or other senior individuals, including managers, who consent to, connive in, or are negligent regarding an offence committed by the provider could be subject on conviction to unlimited fines or even custodial sentences. We must ensure that managers and those running the health and care service in a health care provider provide information in an honest and transparent way that is always in the best interests of patients.

Importantly, we are introducing through the Care Bill a single failure regime to ensure that failure is not only about the financial sustainability of the trust, but about whether a health care provider is providing good care, and the quality of that care. One problem in the past with the trust special administration regime has been that it is rarely used. When it is used, however, it is important to ensure that it is there to protect patients. Often in the past it was used only in a way that focused on financial failure. One important lesson to learn from Mid Staffs is that there should be a failure regime that also considers quality of care. Hospitals are not just about good accounts; they are primarily about delivering good care, which is why we need a single failure regime. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has been a tremendous advocate for the importance of quality of care in trust, and he should be commended for that. Thanks to him, we are now ensuring that we improve the TSA regime in that way.

[Mr Jenkin]

The Minister is outlining the legislative and regulatory changes that arise from the Francis report, but does he agree with the Health Committee, which attaches far more importance to the leadership academy mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State? Is not the quality of leadership much more important to the day-to-day care that is delivered throughout the health service, and will the Minister say a bit more about that?

[Dr Poulter]

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend has seen my brief, but that was exactly the point I was coming to. He is absolutely right and he highlighted the issue earlier in a strong contribution to the debate. It is important to empower front-line staff to be advocates for patient care and to take leadership roles in hospitals. Clinical leadership is at the core of everything that needs to be done, and we must promote strong leadership throughout a health care organisation, and throughout the sector.

We amended the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 so that a person has the right to expect their employer to take reasonable steps to prevent them from suffering detriment from a co-worker as a result of blowing the whistle. That has supported clinical workers and front-line staff in raising concerns and as whistleblowers. We established the NHS Leadership Academy in 2012 as the national hub for leadership development and talent management. Since it launched its NHS fast-track executive programme in January, there have been more than 1,600 applicants. We are also introducing a new fit and proper person test for directors of registered health care providers, which will allow the CQC to insist on the removal of directors who are responsible for poor care. Those strong steps are in place, and there are others, which I would be happy to discuss another time with my hon. Friend, to embed not just clinical leadership but good leadership throughout our health and care services.

Importantly, in delivering high-quality care and embedding good leadership, we must focus much more on outcomes rather than targets. That goes to the centre of what Robert Francis said, and is led by good clinical leadership. What matters in the health service is that we deliver high-quality care based on good outcomes of care for patients, and we must listen to patients about what good care looks like. The Government are delivering those things, which are at the centre of what Robert Francis recommended as lessons to be learned from Mid Staffs.

Finally, I mention the important issue of embedding the patient voice and listening when things go wrong. As the shadow Minister outlined, the Government have introduced the friends and family test, through which nearly 1.6 million patients have already given instant, real-time, feedback to the NHS about their care. Patients are saying what their experience of care is like. It is not about ticking a box or meeting a target; patients are feeding back information and saying, “Yes my care was good” or “No, my care was not as good as it could have been, and this is how it could be improved.” Good care is about ensuring that we deliver clinical excellence through clinical leadership, listening to patients, and ensuring that we feed back their experiences into delivering better services and a better experience of care. Those are things the Government are doing.

Through the chief inspectors of hospitals, social care and general practice, we are putting proper clinical leadership into the inspection process. We are also ensuring that all feedback from patients, whether concerns voiced on the ward or complaints made once they are back at home, makes a difference. I pay tribute in particular to the work done by the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley on the complaints process, on which there were valuable lessons to be learnt. I thank her for her efforts, which have made a big difference. We are still working on further measures we can put in place to ensure that complaints are listened to. This is all about listening to patients, learning lessons and delivering better care.

We are proud of our record in government in listening to patients and ensuring that we develop proper clinical leadership. We are also proud that, as a result of the Francis report and the measures put in place by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, we are beginning to deliver much greater transparency in our health service. It is also important that we have that transparency in the back office. I disagree with what the shadow Minister said about not needing to reorganise the back room. We have to deliver more transparency, better procurement and improvements in how we run the hospital estate. If we do that properly, there will be more money to deliver high-quality patient care.

The coalition Government—I know the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), agrees with me strongly on this—want to see a more productive NHS that is patient-centred and does not waste money in the back office that should be spent on patient care. I make no apologies for organisational steps such as the removal of many of the bureaucratic processes in place under the previous Government, thus saving £1.5 billion a year already. That is good, because it means that more money goes to the front line to deliver high-quality patient care.

The 65th year of the NHS was perhaps its most challenging—certainly in recent memory. The Francis inquiry threw up many challenges for our health and care system, but I believe we are meeting those challenges. Our Government are ensuring that our NHS remains a health service of which we can all be proud, not just today but for many years to come.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of the Francis Report: One year on.

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I have concerns about how much that service is used. My particular concern is not so much whether employers are checking before they employ someone, but whether they are informing the service that an employee should be referred to it for delivering inappropriate care. That is something that we will look at.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I remind my right hon. Friend that the Public Administration Committee is conducting an inquiry into complaint-handling across the public service and that Essex recently had an instance of failure at our local hospital, where complaints were not properly handled. How does my right hon. Friend intend to deliver on his statement that “all patients will be able to access independent help in making their complaint”? May I suggest to him that, rather than setting up a new structure or body, perhaps the ombudsman is the right body to help facilitate those complaints, because it would create a one-stop shop for them?

[Mr Hunt]

We have avoided setting up a new structure or body in our response to the recommendations made by the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley. As for how we will make sure that this happens, I agree with my hon. Friend that the ombudsman is the final port of call if someone is not satisfied with the way in which their complaint has been treated. That is incredibly important, and the ombudsman has herself agreed that she will handle vastly more complaints and go into detail a lot more than she does at present, which is welcome. Prior to that stage, however, lots of people feel that complaining directly to the trust, which has to be the first step, is a very daunting and difficult process and that they want independent help. That is why we have said that it will be an absolute requirement for trusts to show people how they can access that independent help and, indeed, to be prepared to make the finance available so that they get that help. There will also have to be signs on every ward telling people exactly how to do that.