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The EU referendum may be swallowing up the lion’s share of coverage, but health watchers have also had a busy week.
First up, Jeremy Hunt’s favourite topic: patient safety. From the start of his tenure as Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt identified that making the NHS more transparent would drive up standards and improve patient care.
This week, he moved the NHS another step towards this more transparent future, unveiling the first ‘learning from mistakes league’ for England’s hospital trusts. A full package of measures was introduced alongside the league, intended to overcome the hard-to-shift barriers that stop NHS staff speaking out about poor care or hospital mistakes. These include a new independent Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (to encourage and protect whistleblowers) and legal protection for those giving information to an investigation.
This was Hunt’s baby – he even threw it a party, hosting a Global Patient Safety Summit in London for its launch. The announcement got good coverage, and positioned the Health Secretary where he wanted to be: standing up for patient safety, reminding voters of Labour’s Mid Staffs legacy and encouraging NHS leaders to be honest with their staff and those in their care.
So a good week for the Health Secretary? Well, not so much.
The metaphorical gatecrashers to Hunt’s party were the junior doctors, who started their latest 48-hour walk out on Wednesday morning, just as Safety Summit attendees would have been reaching for their first coffee.
The dispute shows little sign of abating, in spite of (and probably because of) the Health Secretary’s decision last month to impose the new contract on doctors. More than half of junior doctors chose to man picket lines rather than hospital wards on the first strike day. The BMA is seeking a judicial review over the contract imposition. And over 5,000 operations and procedures in England were cancelled, compounding the growing waiting lists across the board (another headache for Hunt).
Seizing the opportunity to highlight Hunt’s perceived hypocrisy, Labour’s Heidi Alexander laid into Hunt in her response to his statement on junior doctors. She labelled his approach to the junior doctor dispute ‘kamikaze’ and questioned how he could claim to speak about patient safety when staff morale was at rock bottom.
So a good week for the Shadow Health Secretary? I’m not so sure.
Today (Friday), Green MP Caroline Lucas presents the National Health Service private members bill. The Bill, which seeks to reverse all marketization measures introduced into the NHS over the past 25 years, was originally introduced in the 2015 parliamentary session, co-sponsored by then serial rebel backbenchers, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.
For a centrist frontbencher like Alexander, and many of the ‘moderate’ Labour MPs who share her views, this Bill presents a quandary. Alexander’s stated priorities – funding, standards and social care – do not allow much room for a wholesale fight about the role of markets in the NHS or the top-down restructure that would follow. She has also attempted to carve a profile for herself away from the Andy Bunham anti-privatisation model of the later Miliband years.
But this Bill gives the newly empowered and inspired Labour party membership a vehicle to mobilise around. And mobilise is what they are doing. Grassroots campaign group Momentum has been vocally encouraging members to demand their local MPs attend Friday’s debate and publicly express their support. Many Labour MPs are far from keen.
While attendance in Parliament on a sitting Friday will be easy for MPs to dodge (a packed constituency diary no doubt) their own positioning may be a tougher sell. And how long the Labour front bench can credibly be ‘in discussion’ with the leadership over the Bill and its core concepts without taking a line one way or the other remains to be seen.
Splits, fights, and bruising encounters on all sides? Or as it’s better known: just another health week in Westminster.