Clause 14 - Authorised services
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
10:30 am
Mr Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell, Conservative)
Welcome back to the Chair after our period away, Mr. Griffiths.
As the Minister rightly said, amendments (a) and No. 2, together with Government amendment No. 148, take us back to our previous debate on the duties of NHS trusts in border areas to those patients who live in Scotland or Wales or to those coming from Northern Ireland to take advantage of services at specialist tertiary centres.
The Minister remarked how strongly Members on this side felt about the necessity to make provision in the Bill for trusts in those border areas to be mindful of the needs of people on the other side of borders. That is particularly important. We debated the Countess of Chester NHS trust, one example of a trust with a catchment area. The hon. Member for the City of Chester (Ms Russell) is in her place.
Since that debate, I have communicated with the trust and was told that approximately one third of the practices in Flintshire use the Countess of Chester hospital as their local referring hospital. About 10,000 patients from north Wales are admitted there annually, and there are approximately 40,000 out-patient attendances from the Flintshire area. Therefore, the importance of getting this part of the Bill correct is extremely significant. We cannot inadvertently set the wrong duties for those trusts.
I am greatly reassured by the Minister's comments. I have reflected on the various amendments before us and am happy to accept the Minister's word that the matter is being addressed. When the Bill goes to another place, I hope he will ensure that any previous elements of the Bill that have been debated can be adjusted accordingly so that the same duties are written throughout this measure. However, I am happy to accept that he has taken on board the points made in that debate, and I am grateful to him for doing so.
Amendment No. 3 is designed to take out the requirement to carry out research or to make facilities and staff available for the purposes of education and training. There is an important purpose behind that, and I hope that after I have spoken, the Minister will be willing to give it due consideration. Our concern is that this is unnecessarily prescriptive and could cause operational difficulties within the medical educational world owing to the unique structure that exists for our medical schools.
The Minister will be aware that in most cases medical schools are part of universities and, as such, they receive their funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The decisions taken about the amount of funding that they receive ultimately flow from the Department for Education and Skills. In February 2003, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills decided to skim off 2.2 per cent. of the teaching budget to invest it in a deposit budget to promote a programme of social inclusion. He said that any institution, including medical schools, that does not have a full and proper wide-ranging programme of social inclusion in place for the next financial year will not receive any money from that pot.
As a result, medical schools have lost about 2.2 per cent. of their budget for this year. The medical schools are saying that they will have insufficient time between the issue of the edict by the Department for Education and Skills and the start of the next academic year to get such programmes in place.