Clause 15 - Establishments of patients' forums
NHS Reform & Health Care Professions
6:45 pm
Ms Hazel Blears (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (public health), Department of Health; Salford, Labour)
I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield will be interested to look at the discussions in this Committee. The conclusions that he reaches are a matter for him. Some of the proposals genuinely build on the ideas that he advanced, but his ideas are very different from those in the amendments tabled today, which refer to turning patients forums into patients councils, which was not within his contemplation at all. He was talking about co-ordination, drawing together, learning the lessons and joining up the system, not replacing patients forums with patients councils, which serves to confuse the matter even more.
I shall now explain why the new system is necessary, and why we need patients' forums. The NHS is more complex and multi-layered, and different functions are needed in different parts of the system. Most people involved in community health councils would recognise that there was inconsistency across the piece. Some brilliant community health councils were doing
fantastic work, but it would not necessarily be done the same way in Bristol, Bath, North Yorkshire and Cornwall. Performance was extremely patchy.
The hon. Member for West Chelmsford mentioned the fact that my community health council in Salford did some excellent work. I can also confirm that, for years, it has been trying to pilot new ways of working, which we are proposing to use to involve citizens and find groups who are never involved in public consultation. We want to involve the socially excluded and marginalised: homeless people, asylum seekers, travellers, young people, those who cannot turn up to a meeting on the second Tuesday of the month at the public library, but whose views are equally valid in shaping the health service. The most progressive community health councils carried out that sort of public involvement work and welcomed those ideas, so they have drawn in the views of the wider community.
Over the past six months, I have devoted much time to our listening exercise—talking to CHCs, councils for voluntary service, local authority groups and a range of voluntary groups in the NHS. We have had nine regional listening events and 1,000 people—