Health
Debate between Matt Hancock and Paul Williams(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
No. I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of clean air, but I gently point out that dealing with the deficit—the annual amount by which the Government was overspending—is, and must be, the precursor to getting the debt down. Now, thankfully, the debt is falling relative to the economy, but there has been an awful lot of hard work to get us there.
Let us look at some of the things the NHS is delivering. The entire population now has access to evening and weekend GP appointments. More than a million GP appointments a month are now booked online, and consultation increasingly takes place online. More than three million repeat prescriptions are done online. There are more than 2 million more operations a year than in 2010, and we see 11.5 million more out-patient appointments than in 2010. Since last year, more than 500 extra beds a day have been freed up in hospitals.
When it comes to the future, only yesterday we announced that a new treatment aid for brain cancer can be rolled out across the country, benefiting up to 2,000 patients, all because of the extra money we are putting in. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) is quite right that in return for the extra taxpayers’ money we are putting in, we must get extra out, too.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
Extra investment in the NHS is welcome, but when will the Secretary of State start talking about health visitors, school nurses, drug treatment services and other services funded out of the public health grant—the topic of the debate?
Matt Hancock
The public health grant is settled in the spending review. The NHS settlement has come before the spending review, and the public health grant is only one part of the approach to public health. In 2015, this House agreed, with broad acceptance across parties—I know the hon. Gentleman was not in the House then—that local authorities should take responsibilities for public health, to ensure that the entirety of local authority activity could be focused on better public health.
Public health is not just what happens in the NHS, with councils or in GP surgeries or hospitals. For instance, the Government have taken a global lead in getting social media companies to remove suicide and self-harm content online because of the danger that poses to people’s mental health, and in particular that of children and young people. That is a public health issue. Likewise, the efforts we are making to reduce air pollution in the environment Bill—a broader piece of legislation than just a clean air Act—are about a public health matter. It is not in the public health grant, but it is a public health matter.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Matt Hancock and Paul Williams(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Matt Hancock
Yes, absolutely. Driving the social prescribing agenda, which is based on increasingly strong evidence of the power of social prescribing to help people stay healthy and get them healthy again when they are ill, will also involve wider use of personal budgets. Almost 1 million people have personal budgets.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
I join my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) in paying tribute to the very hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), and I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders). Has the Secretary of State seen Professor Clare Bambra’s research in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health this month, showing that inequalities in infant mortality between deprived and more affluent areas fell between 1999 and 2010 when there was a Labour Government, and then increased from 2011 to 2017? Is it not true that only Labour has the range of co-ordinated, cross-governmental policies that reduce inequalities in child health?
Matt Hancock
No. The NHS long-term plan has a whole swathe of policy to reduce health inequalities. The best thing we can do to reduce health inequalities is ensure that more people are in work, and the record number of jobs that have been delivered is a vital part of that agenda.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Matt Hancock and Paul Williams(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Clearly, part of the £20.5 billion of extra funding that taxpayers are putting into the NHS over the next five years is for ensuring that services can be put on a sustainable footing, and that includes some of the highly stressed services such as those in Stoke.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
How do the Government plan to use funds to better identify perinatal mental health problems? Half of all women with perinatal mental health problems say that the current system does not identify their need.
Matt Hancock
I very much agree with the premise of the hon. Gentleman’s question. We need to do much more on this subject. It is incredibly important, and there will be more to hear in the long-term plan.
Prevention of Ill Health: Government Vision
Debate between Matt Hancock and Paul Williams(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
There are many ways to make one’s food taste good and make it healthy, too.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
It is astonishing that there was no mention in the statement of poverty as a cause of ill health. Is the Secretary of State really so out of touch with communities in this country that he does not see how austerity is making people ill?
Matt Hancock
The statement talks all about the wider determinants of health. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to talk about poverty specifically, it is absolute poverty, not relative poverty, that has a link to ill health, and that has fallen.