Fracture Liaison Services

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood for his indefatigable championing of this crucial issue. I will not repeat the strong arguments that he and others have already made, but I pay tribute to his dogged determination to persuade the Government, as others have said, to turn the “What?” into the eagerly anticipated “How?” and “When?” Like him, I also pay tribute to the Royal Osteoporosis Society for its tireless campaigning on this issue. The rollout of fracture liaison services would strengthen the NHS. I also take this opportunity to thank the Secretary of State for Health for the action he has already taken on an issue that is currently waiting for the NHS.

Whenever we discuss the care of people with a bone condition such as mine, I am inevitably reminded of my childhood orthopaedic surgeon, to whom I owe so much. He came to this country as a teenage refugee from racism—abhorrent, toxic, genocidal racism—the sort of racism spouted by Dr Rahmeh Aladwan. How sad that in the 60th anniversary year of Labour’s Race Relations Act, we are seeing the repugnant resurgence of a racism that claimed the lives of all my surgeon’s relatives who came to wave him off as he left Nazi-occupied Prague, so I would be grateful to the Minister if she could convey my thanks to the Secretary of State for his commitment to reform the system governing the regulation of the UK medical register, and, to quote a departmental source, “to make it easier to kick racists out of the NHS”.

No one has an interest in allowing our NHS to be weakened by racism, and I am sure that my Jewish surgeon would have applauded the Secretary of State’s principled stand, but I am also confident that he would have urged him to detail the how and when of the rollout of fracture liaison services. He was dedicated to me, his patients and the NHS. The rollout of fracture liaison services would build on my surgeon’s life-enhancing legacy. It would change so many people’s lives for the better, as we have already heard, and it would strengthen our NHS. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.