November 1, 2007

10:10am Wednesday 7th November 2007

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Parliament underwent prorogation on Tuesday which marked the end of this session.

The next session starts on November 6 with the Queen's Speech. There will be no surprises in this as the contents were divulged some weeks ago in an innovation that I hope marks Mr Brown as having a different and more open style of leadership than his predecessor.

Prorogation meant that parliamentary business stopped at about noon so we lost the day's business including Health Questions which was unfortunate. The prorogation ceremony gives MPs a chance to speak to the Speaker personally. I thanked him for his generosity to me on heath issues.

Before Tuesday, outstanding business had to be completed. This included the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill Readers may remember that it is only one late section of a long and complicated Bill that relates to the abolition of Patient Forums and the foundation of Local Involvement Networks (LINks) in their place.

The House of Lords has amended the Bill to improve it in several ways which, having been agreed in the Lords, were mostly just rubber-stamped by the Commons.

There remain several aspects of concern about LINks and I had only about three minutes to address these before the conclusion of the debate.

The first concerns the rights of access that LINks members will have to health and social care premises to carry out their service monitoring role and the second is about the gap between the abolition of forums with their statutory powers and the formation of LINks.

I did not get any answers as time had run out but at least I have flagged them up so hopefully we can return to them if access and the transition are serious problems.

There was also a rush to hold annual general meetings of All Party Groups that had to have these before their deadlines to remain in existence.

I attended the Associate Parliamentary Health Group AGM as this is a very useful group that has wide health interests.

My reason for belonging to this is that its meetings cross health boundaries and thus can limit the need for a group specific to every illness which would be quite impossible as there are already so many health-related groups that it is impractical to join more than a few.

Last Thursday we had Professor Lord Ara Darzi at the Health Select Committee.

Seeing some other select committees on the television I think we are rather kinder to our witnesses and Lord Darzi came out of the session pretty well.

I challenged him to remain, as a doctor, independent from the Government which I suspect will be almost impossible but he showed an excellent grasp of current health issues and pleased me by recognising and stressing the importance of medical and nursing leadership in ensuring quality of health care.