The NHS

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour for all of us in this place to speak in this debate on the 70th year of the NHS. We owe a great thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, for showing the initiative. We also owe him a thank you for when he was the Minister on the Benches for the Government, over a number of years, because he certainly got a grip of things when he was there. I also pay tribute to my noble friend sitting on the Front Bench, as it is a long time since we have had a Conservative Member sitting there who has tried really hard to get a grip of the issue.

I am a marketing man by profession and I am looking at the things on which we need action on a practical basis. I start with the GPs; I am married to a retired one. It is not working at GP level today, on the whole. I exempt the GP practice where I am a patient at Greensands in Potton, which is pretty good, but it is not working because there are not enough GPs. There are also not enough district nurses. Those are the two key areas. Just look at the figures for district nurses. The graph has gone down for the last X number of years, certainly the last 10 years. We have to double the number of district nurses, because they are the people who visit patients at home and keep them out of hospital and the GPs’ surgeries. That is point number one.

Secondly, my wife was a full-time GP and she looked after me and three children in our constituency, and all the rest. Initially, she had a small practice and she built up to a very large practice in Bedfordshire. There were night calls and weekend calls. One of the doctors did minor surgery and it worked well. None of that happens today. Why do we not have minor surgery from our GPs? That would relieve our hospitals a little. Why do we not have more GP hub units like the one in Biggleswade today, which works at weekends? It is looked after not by doctors who are running their normal practices, but other doctors do the work and that unit works well.

Thirdly, we need to look at the number of doctors. We have about 50% of what we need. I hope nobody thinks that I am biased, but there is something wrong with the gender balance. Nearly 60% of the medical school intake is female now. The net result, as ladies across the medical profession will know, is that 5% never work, 80% work half-time and about 15% work full-time. Against that background we need two women for every man, so that is a challenge. Moreover, my son works as an Army doctor and he had it in his contract to work for five years. In Singapore, if you take a medical degree you have to work full-time for five years. Not surprisingly, if you leave early you have to pay back the money that has been spent on you.

As a further point, in Bedfordshire there is the Luton and Dunstable Hospital. It has a unit where, when you arrive, they assess you and you go either to its GP unit or to A&E. Seventy per cent go to the GP unit. That is the situation.

Finally, on payments, I am fed up with looking in my surgery at the number of people who do not turn up. Somehow, we have to find an answer to that. Personally, I think we should trial a £10 fee for those who fail to turn up.