On Friday I was proud to announce the winners of the third round of the artificial intelligence in health and care award. Winners included projects within the NHS that identify women at risk of stillbirth, help with neurological conditions, find lung blockages and assess the quality of transplant organs, as well as a number of projects focused on cancer, identifying people’s predisposition and its presence. Since its inception in 2019, the AI in health and care award has invested more than £123 million in 86 promising projects, supporting more than 300,000 patients. AI will come to save countless lives in the NHS in the years to come, and that begins with the investment today.
The Secretary of State should know that I am the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for access to medical cannabis under prescription, for children with intractable epilepsy. The situation is as intolerable as ever. Both product supply and cost are causing families great pain, and their children are desperate. I urge the Secretary of State to meet me to discuss convening a roundtable to help identify solutions to the crisis of lack of access. I am still awaiting a response from his Minister from 18 January 2023.
I am very aware of the hon. Lady’s work as chair of the APPG, so I am not surprised that she asks about that important issue, which she has been assiduous in raising. I will flag up the follow-up with my ministerial colleague. I draw the hon. Lady’s attention to the fact that the National Institute for Health and Care Research remains open to research proposals in this area. I encourage her to ensure through her work on the APPG that bids are made to generate the evidence that the clinicians who make decisions on prescribing need.
T6. Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board was taken out of special measures in 2020 without any tangible improvements. Last week, the board walked out en masse because it no longer had faith in the Welsh Labour Government. The health service is now back in special measures. The Welsh Government run the NHS in Wales, so if the First Minister of Wales were to ask, would the UK Government step in to support them?
We are always happy to assist colleagues across the United Kingdom as part of our commitment to the Union. My hon. Friend is right to highlight current performance in Wales. As I have said, patients are waiting twice as long for hospital treatment in Wales as in England, and more than 50,000 people in Wales are waiting for more than two years for their operation.
When nurses and paramedics voted to take strike action, the Secretary of State refused to negotiate and said that the pay review body’s decision was final. He has now U-turned, but not before 144,000 operations and appointments were cancelled through his incompetence. Will he now apologise to patients for this avoidable disruption?
What the hon. Gentleman omits to remind the House is that at the time the demand from trade unions was for a 19% consolidated pay rise, which is very different from the basis on which talks have been entered into. The point is that we are in discussions with trade union colleagues. Trade unions and the Government have a shared purpose—to address the very real challenges that we recognise the NHS workforce have faced, particularly in the context of the pandemic—and a shared desire, which is to focus on patients and ensure that they get the right care to support them.
I think patients know who to trust, and it is nurses, not the Secretary of State. The Government have still learned nothing: despite a 98% vote in favour of strikes, the Secretary of State was sent to meet junior doctors without a mandate from the Prime Minister to negotiate. What is the point of this Health Secretary if he is in office but not in charge?
I have come to the House literally from a meeting with the trade unions: I met the NHS Staff Council this morning. Once again, hon. Members on the Opposition Front Bench are writing their questions before they see what is actually happening.
T8. Sean Lynk, aged 30, in Ashfield, took his own life just before Christmas. No one saw it coming. Male suicide takes the lives of 12 young men every day in this country. It is the biggest killer of young males under the age of 40. Sean’s father Graham is coming next week to watch me speak in a Westminster Hall debate on male suicide, so could somebody from the Health team please meet Graham and me next Monday?
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. We are launching a prevention of suicide strategy, and male suicide will be a particular focus, as it is a high-risk group. The debate next week will be answered by a Minister in the Department for Education, because it relates specifically to the national curriculum, but I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend and his constituent.
Unprotected sun exposure causes skin cancer, and some 16,000 cases are diagnosed each year. Affordable sunscreen is therefore essential for protection. Will the Secretary of State help to tackle the issue by supporting the Sun Protection Products (Value Added Tax) Bill, a ten-minute rule Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) that would remove VAT on sun protection products?
Sun exposure is one of the most significant causes of cancer. That is one reason why we are working so hard with the NHS to reduce backlogs for people who are waiting for cancer diagnosis and treatment, including by rolling out teledermatology across the NHS to reduce diagnosis times. However, the hon. Gentleman’s question about VAT and skin cancer is a matter for the Treasury.
T9. Finding and fixing the underlying causes of health inequalities has defeated Governments of all types for decades. Less well-off British families still live significantly shorter, sicker lives than richer families, cramping their life chances and making it harder to avoid or escape poverty. The long-expected health inequalities White Paper is essential to changing that. Does the Secretary of State expect it to be published this month? If not, will he meet me to discuss it?
As we heard earlier from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien), the major conditions strategy report will deal with those issues. However, it is also important to consider the variation in performance between integrated care boards and how we can raise the bottom quartile to the level of the top quartile—there is far too much variation within the NHS—and to be data-driven, so that when it comes to genomics and screening we can target the outliers more precisely. That is what is behind the issue to which my hon. Friend has rightly drawn attention.