Clause 37 - Assistance and support
Health Bill
5:15 pm
Caroline Flint (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Health), Department of Health; Don Valley, Labour)
The clause enables primary care trusts to support providers of ophthalmic services on the same footing as they are able to support doctors and dentists. That is a welcome extension to ophthalmic services' role in the family of services provided in local communities. Consistent with our policy of delegating functions to the front line, the clause gives PCTs a directly conferred function to assist and support providers of primary ophthalmic services in their area. Support and assistance could include financial support and the provision of premises on such terms as the PCT thinks fit. That might be important, particularly if the PCT were trying to encourage service providers to locate in areas where provision of the sight test is not as flexible and accessible as we might wish.
The clause will enable PCTs to increase primary ophthalmic services capacity by giving assistance to establish or extend ophthalmic practice premises to see, for example, more NHS patients if that is required. It could also be used if, for example, practices had some temporary problems, such as sickness or a period of maternity leave, that impacted on their ability to maintain a proper level of service for the patients. As I said, the clause is about creating a first-among-equals situation and putting ophthalmic services in the same category as support for doctors and dentists. In that respect, it should be welcome.
The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) asked about NHS Connecting for Health. That is important. Our policy for the national programme for information technology in the NHS has always been, and remains, that over time it will embrace all the clinical services in and around the NHS. I think that he would acknowledge—I know this from issues raised in the House—how ambitious a programme it is to connect up even just the hospitals with the doctors and so forth, and so we are doing this on a step-by-step basis. The task is enormously complex and we need to ensure that we get it right. Inevitably, the key core services—the NHS care records service, choose and book, the new national broadband network, and the electronic prescriptions service—have demanded and continue to demand the highest priority, but that does not mean that we have lost sight of where we want to get to in the future. There are lots of factors to consider, not least the compatibility of current IT systems among many different providers of ophthalmic services in an overarching NHS IT system. They have not been forgotten, but it is a matter of making sure we get it right, step by step.