Oral - NHS Redress Measure

This is an important Measure, because it will bring benefits to patients, and to the national health service as a whole. Knowing that you can make a complaint and have it taken seriously is important in any setting and particularly in public services. In the health service, people are often reluctant to raise concerns, either because they might cause problems for themselves, or because they feel that there is little point. Many people who complain feel that they do not get the outcome that they wanted, and current systems encourage defensive behaviour on the part of the health service. This not only makes patients suffer more, but it also reduces the opportunity for learning from mistakes. All this has to change. The way that the health service handles things that go wrong must be built around the needs of people and patients. People need to feel that they can complain and that they will be treated fairly.

To bring about change, Ministers need to be able to set out some basic rights and arrangements in legislation. That is why I am seeking regulation-making powers in this Measure, so that we can develop better arrangements for settling low-value clinical negligence claims without the need for legal action. It is also why I have invited the health leads from the other parties to join me on a working group where we can take a closer look at many of these issues. The advisory group will be completely separate to the Assembly Measure committee. In its first stage, the Assembly Measure committee will look at the principles of the Measure, but it will also, in due course, consider the Measure line by line and may possibly suggest amendments to it. However, the advisory group has been established to give me a high-level political steer on the wider issues, and it might even consider what the resultant regulations should cover and even those issues for which we do not have the powers to legislate, but for which we might wish to seek framework powers in the future.

I have already had discussions with the party health leads and it is clear that there are many ideas and areas that need to be explored further. I have sent colleagues a list of key issues to consider, to which they are most welcome to add. The issues that we discuss will provide a helpful basis for developing new arrangements.

I have also discussed the issue of no-fault compensation. The current powers are restricted to cases where there is a qualifying liability in tort; they would, therefore, not allow us to set up such an arrangement. I will, however, be considering the issues further and having discussions about seeking further powers in this area. In the meantime, it makes sense to make progress now within the competence that the Measure affords us.

As well as that, my officials are already engaging with the national health service, patients and others, to look at what the problems are in the current systems and to look at better ways of doing things. The Measure will no doubt be subject to a careful level of scrutiny as it passes through the Assembly procedures, and rightly so. I am conscious that we are asking for quite wide powers in this area. At the outset, I will say that this is not about giving national health service organisations the ability to throw money at people in the hope that they will stop complaining or go away, nor is it about encouraging some sort of compensation culture, which I deplore. This Measure underpins part of what we want to achieve across the national health service in Wales, which is to give the health service the tools that it needs to put things right when they have gone wrong and to learn from its mistakes.

The Measure has the potential to cover cases of negligence relating to all NHS-funded services commissioned for, and provided to, Welsh patients. It also makes provision for a number of important principles, including the requirement that people using these arrangements should be entitled to receive legal advice and general support free of charge, to help them to decide whether to accept any offer made to them.

In conclusion, I hope that the Assembly feels able to share and support the Government’s aims in bringing forward this legislation and the benefits that it will bring to patients and the national health service in Wales. I commend the Measure to the Chamber.