Health: Sepsis

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what new efforts they will be making in the coming year to improve public awareness, and clinical management, of sepsis.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord O’Shaughnessy) (Con)]

My Lords, yesterday was World Sepsis Day, a timely reminder that patients rightly expect the NHS to recognise and treat this devastating condition. To continue making progress in tackling sepsis, NHS England yesterday published its Second Sepsis Action Plan. At the same time, NICE published a new quality standard for sepsis, building on the guidance it published in July 2016.

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that constructive response. The House may or may not know that sepsis kills 44,000 in the UK every year. It can develop from a simple scratch on the skin, but it is easily cured with antibiotics. The problem is ignorance of the symptoms on the part of both patients and clinicians. Will the department undertake to explore, with the UK Sepsis Trust, an urgent and impactful awareness campaign that will save both lives and money?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I am grateful to my noble friend for raising this important issue and I should like to pay tribute both to the UK Sepsis Trust and to the campaigner, the parent Melissa Mead. I do not know if noble Lords saw the moving “Panorama” programme broadcast earlier this week about the work that she has done to raise awareness of this issue. She is truly inspiring given that she lost her child.

A major campaign was launched at the end of last year to raise public awareness. It was fronted by the Secretary of State, and, indeed, Public Health England is building messages about sepsis into its Start4Life campaign. I believe that the particular proposal is that there should be a campaign of advertising on the sides of ambulances. The Secretary of State is sympathetic to the idea and is raising the issue with the chief executives of ambulance trusts to see whether this is something that we can take forward.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

My Lords, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my long register of interests, most particularly my connection with Pinewood film studios and my position as a trustee of the Science Museum Group.

I make no apologies for introducing a note of optimism into what has been a somewhat depressing debate with a list of worries and concerns, all of them legitimate and certainly well worth listening to. I will talk about social mobility. A year or two ago, Alan Milburn asked whether I would join his Social Mobility Commission, looking at that issue, and I came away as depressed as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, about the general picture. However, I came away utterly thrilled, delighted and excited by the fact that the sector I represented—namely, the creative sector—is an absolute beacon of social mobility. It is open to anyone and everyone; geography sometimes plays a part as an inhibition to people joining, because so much of the money is in London—more on that in a moment.

I will give your Lordships one example of social mobility. There is an A-list Hollywood director from the north-east of England called Ridley Scott, who commands hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of Hollywood budgets to make movies that people want to see. He is a massive success story. He comes from very humble origins in the north-east; he started his career working in the scenic department of the BBC and ended up directing “Z Cars” and other things. He has made a huge success, together with his late and much lamented brother, Tony. I asked him what his father did for a living and he said, “If you ask my mother, she will say that he was in shipping, but I will tell you that he was actually a riveter in the shipyards of the north-east”. He is only one of many tens of thousands of young, hopeful kids with a bit of talent, who have made their way into the creative sector and made very good livings and contributions, training as technicians, with no training at all, as writers, actors, make-up people and so on. It is great that the sector is advancing.

Unusually from this side of the House, I pay tribute to Gordon Brown, who had the vision to realise the importance of fiscal incentives in the creative industries for us to be competitive internationally. He introduced the fiscal incentives, which successive Governments have increased. Through an era of austerity, the Treasury must finally be convinced that the taxpayers are getting a very good return indeed for the investment they make in the creative industries. Some figures say that taxpayers get eight times their money back and others say 12 times, so somewhere in that range is the result. This is therefore a tribute to Gordon for his vision.

We are an expanding sector and we are internationally successful. I was pleased yesterday that the British Film Institute announced a new industry-led skills strategy backed by an investment of £20 million of National Lottery funding—a huge boost to our skills shortage, which is up and coming because of the expansion. UK film production contributes about £4.3 billion to the UK economy.

Our museums and arts institutions contribute greatly to civilising and, most importantly, inspiring kids. I go around our museums in our group, four which are north of Liverpool, I am happy to say, including the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, the advisory board of which I chair. Watching the results of the investment that has gone into those institutions, seeing the school parties going round getting inspired and plugged in—incidentally, to the STEM agenda—is incredibly exciting. I was pleased to see in the Conservative manifesto a recognition that this sector is so incredibly important to us.

One of the key themes that government has finally grasped is that money has to move out of London. I was thrilled to see the Arts Council for England moving money out of London into the English regions recently. There is beginning to be a real recognition that there is talent out there that cannot afford to come to London. We must move the talent out. It is one of the reasons I would support moving Channel 4 out of London. If you move the money and the air time out of London, the talent will follow. Decentralisation is terribly important. Recognising skills and talent in the regions will help social mobility. I have only one caveat to this optimism: contrary to the forecast of the President of the European Commission, this is all dependent on the English language surviving.