Clause 16
Health and Social Care Bill
6:45 pm
Angela Browning (Deputy Chairman, The Conservative Party; Tiverton and Honiton, Conservative)
I support my hon. Friend on one of the most important subject areas of the Bill. Amendment No. 165 and amendment No. 151, which was tabled by the Liberal Democrats, seek to address the problem. The Minister now has the opportunity to put into the Bill the words
“prevention and management of malnutrition”,
which are so important.
I previously raised the subject in the Committee that considered the Bill that became the Mental Capacity Act 2005. I received a full broadside from the Royal College of Nursing for mentioning it, and it sent me literature showing how individual hospitals were dealing with the problem. That is all very good, but we are talking about the situation at the heart of care. Addressing the problem of malnutrition should be mainstreamed throughout every hospital and care home. It is an indictment of our position today that we are even suggesting in 2008 that such a subject needs to be put into a Bill because there is still a problem after many years.
I will not go into the details of my experience, but I have reached an age at which I have had to care for several elderly relatives, including single people with no spouse, my mother, who died four years ago, and my step-father. My personal experience involving one family in hospitals around the home counties was that I felt that I had to organise teams of family members to go in.