Health Bill [HL]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I know that I am a miserable old Tory Scrooge—I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, is right to berate me on that score—but the Minister gave me an entrée into something that I was going to say anyway when he talked about the need to ensure that innovation was adopted. That is the challenge that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, spoke about as well. It says to me that innovators really desire not so much a pot of money to reward them for their work but to see their innovations used widely in the NHS and quickly to improve patient care. In fact, it is as well to recall a passage from what the Health Committee in another place wrote in 2005: ""The UK is a world-leader and centre of excellence for the development of new medical technologies, but it lags behind many countries in the implementation of these innovative products"." Therefore, we need better incentives designed to encourage the uptake of those innovations. The noble Lord will know that, even today, there remain a whole host of innovative treatments, tools and therapies that the NHS is not adopting rapidly enough. I have a number of examples. One is new therapies for rheumatoid arthritis, where the UK lags behind other countries in adopting new drug treatments. Another is a tool called C-PORT, a wonderful innovation that improves access to cancer medicines and enables services to be planned better but at present not all hospitals with chemotherapy centres have taken advantage of it. There are all sorts of new diagnostic tests where the UK has been held up as a bad example among European countries for the rate at which we adopt them. I am not sure—I would be delighted to be proved wrong—that the prize scheme will make a difference to those sorts of things. The noble Lord mentioned a number of government initiatives in this area, and I note all that he said. I could add one or two more in the review that he published that could do a good job of encouraging uptake, such as the CQUIN schemes. CQUIN is nominally designed to incentivise innovation, and could be used to encourage the system-wide uptake of innovative treatments and therapies. Were one to mandate the national adoption of CQUIN schemes, if they were specifically designed in the way that I have described, you could have a big impact on encouraging innovation across the health service. I do not propose to draw out the debate any longer. At heart, there is a fair degree of agreement among us. I still have a number of niggling doubts about the prize fund. It could lever in some private money on top, which could be very positive, but I note from the impact assessment that the Government regard it very much as an experiment, the results of which they will evaluate in due course. Let us leave it on that basis and wish it all the best. Clause 12 agreed.