Clause 2 - Payments relating to past performance
Health and Social Care Bill
4:45 pm
Mr John Denham (Minister of State, Department of Health; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
Before lunch, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) made several points about the amendments, which are essentially concerned with the publication of information. He made further points about the two-week waits for cancer patients and the financial element in the performance assessment framework. We are moving the NHS on to a much sounder basis of performance assessment, as promised in our manifesto, so that all issues of interest to the patient are considered. We criticise the previous Administration because they focused on financial matters to the exclusion of clinical or patient issues.
Right hon. and hon. Members who have had an opportunity to look at the consultation document that we circulated last week will have seen the indicative spider diagrams at the back of that document. They illustrate how different types of performance can be taken into account in assessing health organisations. They show how health outcomes, health improvement, fair access to services, effective delivery of appropriate care, efficiency and the experiences of patients and carers can all be taken into account in judging the progress of individual organisations.
That is an important element in the performance framework that we are setting out for the NHS. We are consulting on the detail of that with the paper that was published last week. It is right that financial performance should be considered, but it should not be the only criterion. That is the big change that we have made, as compared with the previous Administration.
The introduction of the two-week cancer referral target was an important first step in improving the speed with which patients move through the system. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that the national cancer plan, which was drawn up last autumn, took us much further forward. We are focusing on the whole process of treating cancer patients—not just on the point of referral, but on the point of treatment, and we are setting targets. That work—led by the national cancer director, who is a leading clinician, with the support of experts from across the field—has been widely welcomed in the health service as laying the basis for better cancer services in future. We have also taken that approach in other clinical areas.
We are laying down, year on year, an increasingly robust framework for performance assessment. It is true that, at the moment, we do not have all the information that we would like to be available for assessment, but every year more data is collected and published than ever before about the performance of the NHS and individual organisations. That is the background to the two amendments.
Amendment No. 67 would require the Secretary of State to publish details of the objectives, criteria and methods of measuring the performance of health authorities within 28 days of notifying them to health authorities. The amendment is unnecessary. First, health authorities are already informed of their objectives for each year in a letter that sets out the priorities for the year ahead, which is publicly available.
Secondly, anyone can request details of individual health authority objectives for the year. As I said earlier, the precise method of measuring health authority performance against some criteria may not be notified to health authorities at the same time as the criteria. I shall not repeat the arguments advanced in earlier debates.