Got a question for Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care?

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,

Next week we’ll be back in Westminster to put your questions to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting MP.

His brief covers some big areas that we know are really important to Mumsnetters - including maternity care, access to GPs and dentists, mental health services, social care, public health, and how we keep the NHS sustainable in the long term. If you’ve got a question you’d like me to ask, please post it below.

As ever, one question per user please and keep it civil. We’ll be tight on time, so please keep questions short and sharp, so I can get through as many as possible.

We’ll close the thread on Wednesday pm - so do get your questions in before then.

Thanks,
Justine

Scotland Health Budget is devolved to Scottish Govt.This is long standing and imo the right. Don’t want Scottish health service managed in England
There is no unitary national health service. Provision differs by trust and by postcode
Trusts and ICB set their own priorities there is no unilateral national provision
, they set their own priorities

Why has your government supported a huge reduction in jobs for qualified GPs and instead chosen to employ physician associates, now assistants, who are in no way trained for the jobs that they have been given? Why are you allowing universities to continue to run physician associate courses when the role no longer exists? Do you not realise that if you wage war on doctors, the NHS will suffer?

(and I know you won't ask him this - but if you have the guts - most of his donors have interests in private health. What do they want from him in exchange for the cash that supported his campaign?)

As a proud member of the MN NHS audit working group: we'd be delighted to share the research and our findings with you.

As a former Labour voter who was alienated from the party by its awful treatment of women trying to defend (or even discuss) their rights: thank you for listening, thank you for changing your mind, thank you for saying you'd got it wrong, thank you for apologising. We'd be in a much better place as a society if politicians did this more often.

Student nurses work for free on placements during their degrees. They also pay university fees. When they qualify there are no jobs as they need 6 months experience. Over the last few years 50000!!!! nurses have come over from countries such as India and the Philippines and now newly qualified nurses are riddled with debt and jobless. How is that right?

I would like Wes Streeting to explain what he means by 'Social Care'. Is it nursing care? Domiciliary Care? Care at all?

I know of elderly people accused of 'hogging NHS beds' and being used as a scapegoat for full wards. I would ask why the ward does not apply for Attendance Allowance on behalf of the patient so that they can pay for their own care. Social Services charge for their care unless someone is on pension credit, which is means tested. Older people who cannot manage alone can claim AA and pay for their own help and decide what they want the home help to do.

The elderly who own their own homes can be assessed as being in need of residential care (especially if the house is their only possession and they are not on pension credit), The council have the right to take the house and keep the money until the person dies. They are not a burden on Social Services budget, and get better services if they pay for it.

Ms Reeves in her wisdom is thinking of taxing house sales, which will not help downsizing. Elderly people downsize to pay for care and provide a home for a family.

Is his department talking to Ms. Reeves?

Is he aware that an elderly person who needs care in the community through social workers is alloted 15-30 minutes early in the morning, is got up, sat on the loo and washed while they perform, dressed and taken into the kitchen, given a cup of tea and left until the next visit - usually the next day.

Social Care does NOT include home helps.

The person, who is unable to get themselves out of bed, is then left to get their own meals, do their own housework, and gardening, or pay someone else to do it. That is happening all around the country, and is a disgrace, and social services allow it to happen.Those elderly people who need care also need home helps.

I would also like an answer to this question. Absolute disgrace!

I would like to second this and also clarify when you will remove the unlawful policies on allowing men to self id into female wards and male staff allowed to claim they are female been a female HCP has been requested?

There is a particularly horrendous example of this with the Darlington nurses where the heterosexual man (apparently trying for a baby with his partner) who called himself Rose and paraded his underwear in the female changing rooms was put on the rota to assist in a gynae operation on one of the nurses he was sexually harassing in the changing rooms. The hospital refused to move him to a different task for fear of offending him.

This is sexual harassment of a nurse enacted by the hospital staff and should be explicitly banned, not enabled by policy. This is not an isolated incident where, across the country, men, both staff and patients are currently given free rein to sexually harass female staff and patients in the name of ‘trans rights’.

When will you stop this please?

If every school in the country had Legionella in its water supply, making pupils and staff sick every day, urgent action would be taken. We would never accept children being knowingly exposed to a preventable dangerous pathogen in their place of learning.

Yet Covid spreads through schools daily, making children and families ill, sometimes severely. Some pupils miss weeks of education, some require hospital care, and some suffer long-term health impacts. Staff absences add further disruption. The government’s own data shows all this.

Despite this, schools have been left without basic protections like ventilation upgrades, HEPA filters, or air-quality monitoring.

So my question is this: Why is Covid allowed to spread unchecked in schools when we would never accept the same for Legionella or asbestos, and when will the Government make clean air a basic safety standard in education?

Hi Wes, 2 questions:

1. Given the gaping holes in provision for mental health care, rehabilitation and post-discharge care for the elderly, not to mention decision making gaps for people brought to A&E from care homes without medical oversight and implementation of end-of-life legislation, lack of GP provision/zero domiciliary availabilty AND a bottleneck in redident doctors training numbers -

Can we create a specialist training pathway called SOCIAL CARE MEDICINE ?

2.Given the bizarre disparity between Women’s genitourinary healthcare and that of other humans’ - please can the RCOG powers that be, be told to overhaul training to include routine use of local & regional aneasthesia for invasive procedures and if they need help in training, reach out to the Royal colleges of surgeons for a raft of female experts to help provide this for them and draft some non-barbaric guidelines?

Interestingly enough, there is no excuse for this, as technology exists that would prevent any person to person transmition in a hospital. So this is a very good question!!

Echoing the SEN question above. There is no health service for my autistic daughter. When are you going to separate mental health needs and health needs relating to neurodiversity? She needs urgent OT. She’s as likely to fly to the moon - she’ll just stay on a list until the window for improvement has closed. Her healthcare is tied to the toxic EHCP process (currently appealing a decision not to assess) which means that she gets neither educational help nor health help.

This but more specifically why is it seen as acceptable that most of us have to pay hugely inflated prices for routine dental work.

can more not be done to persuade dentists to take on more nhs patients?

(and I know you won't ask him this - but if you have the guts - most of his donors have interests in private health. What do they want from him in exchange for the cash that supported his campaign?)

To me this is one of the main questions to ask.

WRT to toilet design, @Keeptoiletssafe will know as we have discussed before that the IBD community would NOT want gaps under toilet doors. For their privacy and dignity most people with IBD want private self contained cubicles.
I know for a fact that my daughter would not use any toilet where she would fear being overheard or where smells might be traced back to her etc.
I am not sure how that can be balanced - safety Vs privacy and dignity.

He will probably tell you that when nursing training after the war was not only free but nurses were paid, they went abroad as soon as they qualified, and the NHS continued to be short of nurses.

He will not do anything to relieve the situation with the NHS because it might mean favouring the better off.

A few decades ago there was income tax relief on private health insurance, and more people paid and went privately. Then it was stopped, and the NHS took the brunt of what was in essence a rise in private medicine.

Should that tax relief be brought back, or is there another way of dealing with the problem of the overworked NHS? How much more can we take in increases of national insurance?

I agree. The air was better in aircraft when smoking was allowed.

It is also a question of cleaning. I was in a hospital ward and the cleaner came round with a high brush and dusted the bedrails and curtains and shook the long handled broom between each bed!

I can answer this - Legionella is a particularly nasty bacteria and humans don’t adapt over time to develop a resistance. Asbestos is a mineral fibre and if you’re unlucky enough to be exposed and then even unluckier to have a single fibre embedded end-on in your lung tissue, then after many years you’ll get asbestosis. In contrast with viruses like Covid humans develop resistance over time with repeat exposure (except for vulnerable cases or unlucky susceptible people) like regular flu. So while there are benefits long term to having Covid normalise, the other two will be hazardous for a long time to come

There actually isn’t evidence that humans build up lasting immunity to COVID in the way we do with flu. In fact, multiple studies show that COVID infections can cause lasting immune dysregulation and even damage parts of the immune system, leaving people more vulnerable to all illnesses. Each infection is also cumulative, meaning the risks don’t reset after you recover. Instead, the likelihood of complications, including long COVID, increases with repeated infections, even in previously healthy people - including children - with no underlying conditions.

So unlike flu, where prior exposure can help reduce severity over time, COVID doesn’t behave the same way. It’s not something our bodies are “adapting to” in a straightforward protective sense — if anything, the risks compound.

And that’s not hearsay or vibes, that’s what the scientific evidence says.

Thank you - I wasn’t aware of that. Probably best if that’s in the question instead of the asbestos/legionella because that’s built environment specific, whereas the Covid problem sounds much more wide ranging

That is quite clearly a load of cobblers

Scientific data and many many studies say otherwise! 🤷‍♀️

no they don’t

Google it. There are many studies on the long-lasting effects of Covid, especially on the immune system:

www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-covid-can-trigger-changes-immune-system-may-underlie-persistent-symptoms

Well I don’t want to highjack the thread but you are either not understanding or dangerously misinterpreting the scientific information. Your prior statement is just cobblers which can spread harmful misinformation to others.