Clause 178 - Healthwatch England

Part of Health and Social Care (Re-Committed) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:45 pm on 14 July 2011.

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Photo of Paul Burstow Paul Burstow The Minister of State, Department of Health 2:45, 14 July 2011

Training is an essential part of making sure that the committee does its job, but also training at a local level for local healthwatches. That is one of the things we are exploring through the early implementation of local healthwatches.

I was also asked whether the CQC had failed and whether a body that was part of the CQC could blow the whistle on it. Healthwatch England certainly can do that, because of the clear statutory independence that the Bill provides. If it considers that it is appropriate to advise the Secretary of State on relevant matters within its remit, then the Secretary of State, under the amendments and other changes we are making in the Bill, will have to have regard to advice on how he discharges his functions with regard to an organisation’s failure.

Healthwatch England can therefore formally advise the CQC, which would have to respond—this is one of the amendments that we will come to later—and Healthwatch England could publish that advice. It can raise an issue with the CQC, the CQC has to have regard to it, and their exchanges can be published as well.

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland made a number of points and a key question I want to address is who do people complain to. If someone has a complaint about a service that they received from a provider, they would write to the provider. I would imagine that, as a constituency MP, that is what the hon. Gentleman does now, so he would write to the NHS trust or the foundation trust that provided the service.

If the issue was about a service that was not well specified, the hon. Gentleman may well choose to write to the local commissioner, so he would write to the clinical commissioning group. If he continued to have concerns, he could raise them with the local healthwatch and seek its support. Ultimately, if he felt that the complaint had not been dealt with satisfactorily through the various stages that each organisation would have to set out, he could take it up with the health service ombudsman. There are therefore a number of stages that he or his constituents could use to proceed with a complaint.

The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East spoke about the importance of involving children and young people, and I know other hon. Members share that view. It is important to make sure that, as organisations are established nationally and locally, they hear and respond to the voices of young people. That is particularly the case in later amendments which deal with representativeness. The measures capture that concern, and we should make sure that in establishing those bodies they involve young people.

I will give a couple of examples of good practice. The first is the work of the National Children’s Bureau, which runs a young inspectors programme, which is a good model of how local healthwatches could engage with young people and use their eyes, ears, views and imagination to improve services for them. That is one of the things that we want to explore through the early implementers programme.

It is worth putting one other example on record. We are in the process of redesigning child and adolescent mental health services in England to extend the idea of talking therapies to young people. That is something  new that the Government have committed themselves to implementing, and we are working with Young Minds, an expert charity in the field, which is bringing young people directly into the process of redesigning the services. That is a model of how services should be redesigned in future, ensuring that they are tailored to the experience and expertise that young patients can bring to services, and it is very much at the heart of how we want the NHS to be reformed.