Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, has demonstrated so clearly, the NHS is currently failing to provide spinal cord-injured people with the care that they need. The provisions set out in this amendment would go far to improve the situation. Early admission to a spinal cord injury centre is vital to ensure that patients have the best chance of recovery to their spinal cord, and to prevent them having to be subject to further unnecessary complications such as pressure sores and contractures. Such complications can not only extend patients’ initial hospital stay by months or even by years but reduce the quality of the rest of their lives. I declare an obvious interest as someone who was injured more than 40 years ago. Incidentally, the woman in the bed next to me when I arrived at hospital had already been there for six months, healing a pressure sore that she had received in a general hospital. She was still there in the same bed when I left. I am only too aware that my excellent initial treatment has dictated my whole experience of living with spinal cord injury. Within two days, I was flown to the Stoke Mandeville Hospital spinal centre, and despite having been catapulted into a bewildering new state of being where I could neither feel nor move, I was totally reassured that I was being given the best possible care by people who had long experience of my condition. Most importantly, my family and friends were reassured, too. I was the norm, surrounded by people in the same position as me and who were now learning how to manage their new bodies and get back to everyday life. What a stark contrast to the fate of someone for whom a spinal bed cannot be found. They face becoming the single, depressed tragedy on a district hospital ward, with no role models to learn from, watching other patients get better and walk out, and being treated by staff who may be as new to spinal cord injury as they are. As the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, has said, since we put forward this amendment in Committee we have had a very useful meeting with the acting director of the National Commissioning Group and her colleagues. In the correspondence since, we have been given assurances that positive progress has been made to include the monitoring of beds in spinal units in NHS emergency bed services. That will be reported on by the end of May. It is also proposed that the current south of England strategy board will be extended and strengthened to include all the specialised commissioning groups. We are extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Thornton for all that she has done to enable this to happen. We will keep a close watch to see that progress is maintained, and I hope that my noble friend Lord Darzi can give us every assurance that he will make sure that it is, otherwise I have no doubt that this matter will be raised again when the Bill passes to the Commons.