Osteoporosis

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:20 pm on 26 October 2023.

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Photo of Anna Firth Anna Firth Conservative, Southend West 12:20, 26 October 2023

I congratulate Judith Cummins on securing this debate. She has made a brilliant speech on a critical topic. As she brilliantly points out, osteoporotic fractures can be prevented and screening is the first step. If we could stop these breaks in the first place, not only would we save lives but we would save the NHS money and enable all our residents and constituents to live longer, healthier lives.

As I said earlier, the statistics are truly terrifying. One in three people over the age of 50 who break a hip go on to die of that injury within a year. We are talking about saving lives. The hon. Lady rightly mentioned that FLS is the start of this. The first FLS to roll out a consistent screening and prevention process across an entire trust will launch at Southend Hospital next spring. It is estimated that the service will prevent 550 fractures in mid and south Essex, saving the trust approaching half a million pounds and, critically, 1,300 bed spaces each year. If that were rolled out across the entire country, we would be looking at preventing 74,000 osteoporotic fractures, saving three quarters of a million bed days and hundreds of millions of pounds, to which the hon. Lady rightly referred.

The hon. Lady is right that this is the future of the NHS—we should be aiming at prevention—and that stopping women, in particular, suffering these osteoporotic fractures has to be done by rolling out FLS across the whole country. I hope the Minister will agree that other regions should follow Southend’s example. It is an exemplar and I thank him and the hon. Lady for giving me this opportunity to speak.