Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Graham Allen and Anne Milton

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

15. What steps his Department is taking to prevent ill health and its associated costs through early intervention.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)]

The public health reforms have at their very heart the prevention of ill health and its associated costs, and the hon. Gentleman in his question clearly recognises the critical impact that intervening early can have. The health visitor work force are an important part of early intervention. We picked up a very demoralised and depleted health visitor work force, so I am pleased to report that training commissions for health visitors are up 200%, and we plan to double the number of family nurse partnerships available by 2015. We are also developing a vision for school nursing.

[Mr Allen]

The introduction of the family nurse partnership and the enhancement of the amount of money available to it is a great credit to the previous Labour Government and the current coalition Government. It enables single teen mums to get one-to-one help from a health visitor. Given the economic circumstances, does the Minister accept that we need to be a bit more inventive to ensure that that very good scheme goes even further? Will she discuss with the city of Nottingham and its health service a payment-by-results system to extend the family nurse partnerships further?

[Anne Milton]

Yes, we are supporting the development of social investment and outcome-based funding models, and I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised the issue of being innovative about how we do that, because it is important. We had a rather static situation previously, so I welcome his interest in developing and testing a payment-by-results scheme in Nottingham, and we will be interested to see his detailed proposals and how that develops locally soon. What matters are the results that we get from the schemes.