Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, as we have heard, the ongoing blockade of the Lachin corridor is causing a humanitarian crisis which has been widely condemned but to no discernible effect. Food is being rationed in Nagorno-Karabakh, schools are closed because of shortages and families have been separated. Does the Minister agree that it is time for the international community and the Government to step up the...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for the passionate and determined way he has pursued this vital issue over many years. As the first Armenian in the British Parliament, and as a descendent of a genocide survivor, I owe him a particular debt. I was born in Iraq to Armenian parents made refugees by the 1915 genocide, in which more than 1 million ethnic Armenians were...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I have a few minutes to finish off. I thank everyone here for their amazing contributions on this very special day—the 70th anniversary of the NHS. The thoughts and ideas, although diverse, were all united in one thing: not just celebrating the past but designing the future. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, my noble friend Lord Hunt and the Minister. The noble...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, in opening this debate, I declare my interest. I am a practising surgeon in the NHS at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and the Royal Marsden and am the chair of surgery at Imperial College. I proudly sit as a non-executive director of NHS Improvement. Over the past 10 months, I have led an independent review of the health and care system with the Institute for Public Policy...
Lord Darzi of Denham: I suggest that the last person I will ask about their experience is the person who is conflicted.
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, for calling this debate. I declare an interest: I am a surgeon working in the NHS, the chair of surgery at Imperial College London and a consultant surgeon at Imperial College and the Royal Marsden NHS trusts. I am also a non-executive director of NHS Improvement. I have always been a passionate champion of change in the NHS, so long as...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My apologies, my Lords. Just to finish, I strongly believe that this debate is based on complete fallacy in terms of the evidence supporting it and I urge the Government not to dismantle the most important hospital contributing to the treatment of congenital and non-congenital heart disease in this country.
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I acknowledge the noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, who is leading on the Bill. Before I begin, I declare an interest in that I sit on the advisory council of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. I also hold an academic appointment at Imperial College London. This country is a research superpower. We have world-leading research that contributes to the...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 42. I declare an obvious conflict: I am a recipient of funding from the National Institute of Health Research; I am also a senior fellow in the NIHR. We should all be very proud that huge investment has gone into research in the NHS. The reforms of the past decade have been significant. We have been used as the exemplar across the globe not just on...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I enter the debate speaking as a professional working in the health service, but also as someone who has had the opportunity and privilege of serving in government. I might know something, therefore, about the accountability of driving quality and improvements. I also had to learn fairly quickly about the accountability in this democracy and the accountability, as the noble Lord,...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, we live in a time of rising fear. We fear losing our jobs, we fear riots in the streets and we fear that our economic future and our country's place in the world are no longer secure. A little over 60 years ago, the National Health Service was founded to take away the fear that getting sick meant going broke, and growing old meant becoming poor, with rising healthcare bills. Today,...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I welcome the Statement from the noble Earl and also congratulate him on his leadership in getting us back on track. One of the commonest sayings about a good clinician, whether a doctor or nurse, is that they listen to a patient but also seek the opinion of others if dealing with a complicated case. In this instance, the noble Earl has done both. I am very reassured that the...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, yet again I am grateful for a very constructive debate on these regulations. I will attempt to address the large number of questions. If I do not complete in time, I will be more than happy to write to noble Lords with more detailed answers. I start with the exemption powers, which the noble Earl, Lord Howe, raised in relation to Regulation 2. The power under which these regulations...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I shall speak to the draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Appeals) Regulations, the draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Special Exemption) Regulations and the draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Consequential Amendments and Transitional and Saving Provisions) Order. I will describe briefly each set of statutory instruments, starting with the appeals regulations. The...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, the NHS has made excellent progress in implementing this important health and safety legislation, which ensures that patients receive safe, high-quality care from staff who have not worked excessive hours. Only doctors in training remain to become fully compliant by 1 August and two-thirds of them are already working a 48-hour week averaged over 26 weeks. Our overriding principles...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I am aware of these debates and refer to a publication from the Institute of Medicine in the US, which is the US academy. It stated that the surgery profession was concerned about the shift in work mentality, loss of professionalism and decreased access to quality surgical care; but that it was difficult to assess how much of the complaining represented rhetoric and resistance to...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, there have been 200 successful applications across 13 specialties, which represents about 3 per cent of all the rotas. I could write to the noble Baroness with details of which regions and what specialties. The 3 per cent is what we believe needs to be derogated by 1 August. However, if there are strains on services within a period of 26 weeks—we calculate the 48-hour week over a...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising the issue. She is correct that we have had 10 years to get these rotas compliant. There are 200 rotas and, to be fair to the service—I am sure that the noble Baroness will agree—there are some sub-specialties for which we find it extremely difficult to make these rotas compliant: for example, transplantation in children and some...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, I am told that the directive was introduced in Europe at a time when impact assessment was not a part of the introduction of European legislation. However, I share the noble Lord's concerns about its impact on the quality of training for the future generation of surgeons, which is an important issue. To address that, we need to start a dialogue not around the numbers of hours of...
Lord Darzi of Denham: My Lords, any doctor employed in the National Health Service who might provide services within an NHS provider or outside in social community services will be obliged to comply with the 48-hour working time directive.