Dr Caroline Johnson
MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Continuity of care is desirable but not always possible, and in circumstances where it is not, a single patient record offers an opportunity to improve care, but it also brings the risk of unauthorised access to notes. We have seen recent high-profile cases where notes have been accessed that should not have been.”
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“Support and understanding of what they can do to help their baby is something that I think women and men value, because almost everyone loves their children intently, so they will want to do the best for their baby, and sometimes it is helpful to know what that is.”
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“Many of them have merged, and some of those mergers have been paused by the Government. This is all a distraction. NHS England has a role, but it is being abolished too. Apparently, the overall headcount in the DHSC and NHS England is to be halved.”
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“As a paediatrician, I saw the profound effect that children not receiving the care that they need in the early years can have. Some cases were of deliberate neglect, and I saw children who had delayed growth, delayed development or physical changes.”
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“People are sometimes frightened to provide feedback to trusts, but they will be more willing to do so when they have confidence in being heard independently.”
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“How will the Government improve the variability between trusts that do not fall into the bottom cohort? How did they choose the five trusts that were chosen?”
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“Continuity of care is desirable but not always possible, and in circumstances where it is not, a single patient record offers an opportunity to improve care, but it also brings the risk of unauthorised access to notes. We have seen recent high-profile cases where notes have been accessed that should not have been. That has led to people across the country worrying that this issue could affect them personally in less high-profile cases and about what will happen when the single patient record will be available nationally. How are the Government going to protect patient confidentiality?”
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“Another issue that affects continuity of care is when patients remain in the emergency department for prolonged periods after a decision is made to admit them to a ward. That has gone up by over a third since the general election. Can the Government say why?”
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“Sometimes parents may not understand the importance of certain interventions, or they may need support to deliver them. That is where this Bill comes in.”
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“As a paediatrician, I saw the profound effect that children not receiving the care that they need in the early years can have. Some cases were of deliberate neglect, and I saw children who had delayed growth, delayed development or physical changes. I remember one little boy who was admitted with vomiting, but he was not ill with a medical condition. We discovered that he had learnt to vomit because nobody came when he cried. Those children need us to step up in a way that we do not always do at the moment. There is a spectrum, and most of the children are thankfully not in that situation, but it does demonstrate the profound changes that can occur if children are not looked after. However, we also see the profound improvements that can occur if children receive all the things that they need to thrive to their best potential.”
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“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West on introducing this important Bill. I also recognise the contributions of Members of both Houses, and that of the former Members of Parliament Andrea Leadsom and Will Quince, who have done so much work in this area. I declare an interest, Dame Siobhain, as a consultant paediatrician in the NHS and a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. I put on record that the Opposition support this Bill. Child development is hugely important; that is why Committee members are here today. It is also why I am in this place at all, as it was a major motivator for me to become an MP.”
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“Member for Washington and Gateshead South, who I know has done a lot of work in this area over the years and cares about it very deeply, talks about outcomes. Outcomes are important, but so is value for money, because we must be careful with taxpayers’ money. What interventions are making the most difference, and how do we focus on achieving them? We need to think carefully about what we measure. Overall, however, this is a good Bill that will help infants and children to develop their full potential and have equality of opportunity, and therefore I will support it.”
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“Does the Minister have any comments on how those services will be provided in rural environments? Very often the average income for a postcode may be good, but there will be hidden poverty within it, because of discrepancies within postcode averages that are seen less in cities. Transport can also be more difficult in rural areas. How will the Minister ensure that the services are accessible to those who need them? I want to talk about the money, because if we invest £1 in a child’s life at this age, we can get £10 in return owing to better outcomes in the long run. Will the Minister confirm that the money for those services will be provided in full, and that there will be a workforce plan to ensure that there is a workforce to deliver them? The hon.”
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“Support and understanding of what they can do to help their baby is something that I think women and men value, because almost everyone loves their children intently, so they will want to do the best for their baby, and sometimes it is helpful to know what that is. I often get patients in clinic who come with one problem, but if they have a small infant, they will often say, “While I am here, doctor, can you just look at this? Can I just ask about that?” I am sure the hon. Member for Stroud, as a GP, will tell us the same. Parents ask because there are so many questions, and having the opportunity to have them answered is very important. I also want to talk about inequalities, because we have talked a lot about them this morning. There is now inequality between the services provided in cities and those provided in rural areas.”
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“I think it is important that we have both women and men in politics, because fathers have an important role to play with babies too, and gentlemen can talk about their experiences of fatherhood. One of the challenges that some babies face is the lack of that male role model. It is a balance between the two. And, of course, women and men can talk about each or either topic if they wish to do so. The other thing I want to talk about is interaction and play—the serve and return. Being played with and stimulated is very important for brain development, and a lack of it can lead to reduced attention span, reduced memory and weaker impulse control in the long run. People might believe that interaction and play come instinctively, and to some they do, but to others less so.”
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“That will come to us all eventually, but the experience might be one of comfort, in line with the wishes of the individual—as good as can be delivered. Conversely, one could on the face of it have a good surgical outcome from a trust but a poor experience of care during that experience. Experience is measured in a number of different ways: individual staff, such as consultants, have patient feedback as part of their appraisal and revalidation; the friends and family test enables people to give anonymous feedback; the number of complaints or compliments can be measured; and trusts do their own surveys—but those are all to some extent internal processes.”
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“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I congratulate the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) on securing this debate on a subject important not only to her constituents but to all of us right across the country. The performance of the NHS is key to the health of the nation. It gives us all the best chance of good health and recovery, which is important for our social wellbeing and brings economic benefits. The first question is this: how do we know which trusts are performing well and which are not? First, we need to decide what good performance looks like. We can look at that in a couple of ways, in particular in relation to outcome and experience, both of which are important. The outcome, for example, may be a death.”
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“This Government decided that they wanted their own workforce plan—they won the election so they are very much entitled to make one. But they have still not written it. They promised it by the end of 2025; we are rapidly approaching the end of 2026 and it is still not with us. Can the Minister— [Interruption.]”
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“How will the Government improve the variability between trusts that do not fall into the bottom cohort? How did they choose the five trusts that were chosen? As we heard earlier, there are several metrics by which some trusts could be considered in the bottom five, but they were not chosen, and some metrics by which those that were chosen may not be in the bottom five. How has the Minister chosen those trusts and how does she intend to improve those that do not fall into her chosen few? The Government have promised a workforce plan, but the workforce is the most important thing. Right hon. and hon. Members have spoken in this debate about the really good staff in their trusts working extremely hard in very difficult conditions. The previous Conservative Government developed a long-term workforce plan.”
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“Many of them have merged, and some of those mergers have been paused by the Government. This is all a distraction. NHS England has a role, but it is being abolished too. Apparently, the overall headcount in the DHSC and NHS England is to be halved. How will they have the bandwidth to provide the scrutiny that the Government say they will have? Having identified the management of poor performance, the Government chose five trusts—North Cumbria, Mid and South Essex, Hull University Teaching Hospitals, Northern Lincolnshire and Goole, and East Kent—to have a special intensive recovery programme in March 2026. However, it is not clear what has been instituted in those trusts, what outcomes that programme is developing, how long it will last or what the Government will do for those trusts that fall just outside that group of five.”
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“When the Government take the Health Bill through the Lords in Committee in the next week or two, I hope that they will think again. The Government also plan to roll a number of other things into the CQC at the same time, including events management; I wonder whether they are asking an organisation that they acknowledge has been struggling to take on too much. If poor performance is identified, who is responsible? Is it the consultant or the matron? Is it the directors’ suite—the chief executive or the chair? Ultimately, if a trust is underperforming at the moment, governors are supposed to hold the board to account. The Health Bill abolishes those. The ICBs—the commissioners—can hold the trust to account but their budgets have been halved, so will they have the capacity to do so?”
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“I am afraid that the numbers waiting for a procedure or operation are higher now than at the general election. This year, many more people than in 2024 waited more than 12 hours in A&E after a decision to admit them. Staff sickness rates, mentioned earlier in the debate, are also consistently higher than they were before the general election. Statistics across the NHS are not going in the right direction. The Government also measure outcomes through the financial management of a trust, leadership and Government metrics, the number of procedures performed, the number of “never” events, and CQC inspections. Again, the Government are planning to fold HSSIB into the CQC, which many commentators have warned against; the Liberal Democrats and we the Opposition have spoken against the abolition of HSSIB.”
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“People are sometimes frightened to provide feedback to trusts, but they will be more willing to do so when they have confidence in being heard independently. Other ways in which the Government measure experience relate to waiting times—how long it takes to be seen in clinic, how long it takes to be seen in A&E, how long it takes from the decision to admit a patient to actually admitting them, or how long it takes for a procedure or an operation. The Government produce lots and lots of figures but many of them, I am afraid, go in the wrong direction. The Government have a dashboard for the referral to treatment statistics, and the waiting lists are rising. The number reached a low point in March 2026, just after the reports of exceptional numbers of removals, but it has now risen by 222,000 in the past four months.”
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“Sorry, the microphone went off, but it has just come back on again. The processes are mostly internal. Healthwatch is an independent patient voice, which looks at people’s experience across the health service in a way that is independent of Government. As part of the Health Bill, however, the Government plan to abolish Healthwatch and to bring it inside the Department. Will the Minister comment on whether they still plan to do that? When he was Mayor of Greater Manchester and in charge of its integrated care board, the Prime Minister wrote to the Government to suggest that they might be on the wrong path. As Prime Minister, does he still think so? What instructions has the Minister had in relation to that?”
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“I urge the Minister to say when the Government intend to respond to that report. The Government need to get a grip of who is holding the trusts to account, so that when the Health Bill comes out the other side of the Lords, there is a clear chain of command. Perhaps it will lead up to the Secretary of State, but it is clear that they will not be able to micromanage every detail. There needs to be a clear path so that people know who is accountable, who will drive improvement, who to congratulate when improvements are made and who to hold accountable when it goes wrong.”
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“The Government are internalising patient experience, which means that it may suddenly look much better, but how will anyone have confidence in the figures if they are produced by the Government marking their own homework? The abolition of NHS England has been badly planned. ICB cuts, mergers and paused mergers are simply a distraction. The removal of the need for governors removes another layer of accountability and scrutiny. The Government say they are working at pace, but it is a very slow pace. The workforce plan and the maternity plan have been delayed, but so have things like the Hughes report. People suffering from valproate and mesh have been waiting and waiting. It is getting towards three years since that report was published. They have waited long enough.”
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“They did a review, which took six months longer than it was supposed to. They were then two years into a parliamentary term. That plan says that they will have a commissioner, who they have yet to appoint, and another plan for a modern service framework, which is apparently due by Christmas. Can the Minister guarantee that, two and a half years into the Parliament, they will have a delivery plan for maternity improvements? The bottom line is that I am concerned that the Government are too busy reorganising the NHS to deliver on their promises. NHS performance is declining in many areas. There is huge variability between trusts and departments. The Government picked five for intensive treatment. What about the others? Can the Minister clarify that it works?”
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“Before the interruption, we were talking about the importance of workforce to the health service and to any improvements that we wish to make to services. The previous Conservative Government developed a long-term workforce plan. This Government decided to develop their own, which is fair enough, but it is very delayed. Can the Minister tell us, without using the words “in due course”, “imminently” or “soon”, when it will be published, preferably giving a date? Returning to other plans, the Government say that maternity and neonatal care is their priority, which is good, but when they came into government, they said that they had a plan to improve it. They spent the first 12 months writing their 10-year plan, which said that they would produce a maternity and neonatal plan.”
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“It is clear that the hon. Member is taking this issue very seriously and thinking about it very deeply. What does he think about inheritance tax on businesses? I give him the example of a bandage factory making sterile bandages, owned by a family, where the 40-odd-year-old gentleman currently running that factory stands to lose quite a lot of money when his father dies. That will mean laying off people or selling the factory. How does that help the people who work there?”
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“The hon. Gentleman is making a distinction between money earned by somebody and money earned by their father. If a man and his daughter run a business together and the father dies, should the daughter not inherit? How much did she earn the money by working in that business? Did she not earn it? Why should it matter? That business employs people—whom the hon. Gentleman has talked about—who will lose their job if that business must close.”
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“On the point of ideology, what I have tried to get from my interventions is an understanding on the Government Benches that inheritance tax penalises people at all levels. If people do not start a business because it is not worth the bother, if they do not invest because it will be taken off them, and if they cannot pass a business on to their children and, as a result, it has to be sold and the jobs are lost, people do not have jobs and employment, and everyone is affected.”
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“My husband is a farmer and runs businesses. He feels a huge responsibility not just in building his business, but to the people he employs. Those people will be affected if the business does not grow or does not invest because he is worried about this tax.”
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“I know that the Secretary of State cares very deeply about this topic, so I would like her reassurance that these plans will be published, the staff will be trained and the taskforce and commissioner will be effective, and that she will deliver on the maternity safety that everybody right across the House wants to see.”
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“Will she talk about vaccination and chronic disease optimisation before pregnancy and how they could help to reduce the number of babies lost? On a wider level, the NHS is being reorganised. I appreciate that that was announced before the Secretary of State became the Secretary of State, but the abolition of NHS England and the shaking up of ICBs is causing disruption to health services. The abolition of Healthwatch, which she still has time to do something about, is removing the independent voice—the listening to women that we have heard about so much this evening. There are many, many fantastic NHS staff, and many women—most women, in fact—get great care, but some do not, and the findings of recent investigations and investigations over many years have been hugely disturbing.”
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“On training, will the Secretary of State elaborate on how she intends to encourage midwives and obstetricians to see themselves as one team? I know in some places they do, but in other places, tragically they do not. Will she set out how they can work together with the wider team of anaesthetists, paediatricians and other professionals to achieve the best outcomes for women, rather than a particular ideological outcome? Some have talked this evening about the complexity of pregnancies in modern times. Can the Secretary of State talk about whether she feels nursing skills are required in midwifery, and to what extent? How does she intend to ensure that they are delivered? I know that the Government have their three shifts, one of which is prevention.”
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“The Government promised time and again that they would double the number of medical school places, yet they have rowed back on that promise like it never existed. Will the Secretary of State tell us once and for all if the Government will be doubling the number of medical school places, or if that was just a 2024 general election promise? On what date will the workforce plan be ready and published? The manifesto also promised to train thousands of additional midwives. Will the Secretary of State tell us how many have been trained so far? My right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash and my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) spoke about the importance of listening to women and not having an ideological fixation on a normal birth or particular type of delivery, but instead looking for a good outcome.”
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“The last Conservative Government created a long-term workforce plan for the NHS, but this Government decided that they wanted to create their own workforce plan, which is absolutely their right to do so. We were promised that plan by the end of 2025. We are now deep into autumn 2026, and we are being told they will provide an update on the workforce plan “in due course”. Having previously been told it was imminent, that is somewhat disappointing. The Government need to know and say how many midwives they are going to need, as well as how many obstetricians, gynaecologists and paediatricians. How will all those people be trained? How many more medical school places may be required?”
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“Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti) talked about people experiencing baby loss or who had babies on the neonatal unit being placed on a ward next to people who were celebrating the births of healthy children, who were beside them. Will the Secretary of State say how she is going to manage that so it does not happen any more? The Government have spoken about the black and Asian maternal mortality gap. In their manifesto, they committed to a target to close that gap. Will the Secretary of State tell us when that target will be published and how she will close that gap? The workforce is key to delivering these outcomes.”
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“Will it be delayed by putting it on a statutory footing or will she be able to make the appointment anyway? The second recommendation is to develop a modern service framework to establish minimum standards for maternity care. The Government announced that they were developing a national action plan on that, but it will not be ready until December 2026. Will the Secretary of State guarantee that it will be ready by December 2026, which is now very soon? In the meantime, the Government have promised £41 million for maternity and neonatal buildings. Will the Secretary of State tell us how and where this money will be spent, and which hospitals will benefit? My hon.”
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“The Government came to power in July 2024 saying that they had a plan for the NHS, but it took them a year, until July 2025, to bring forward their 10-year plan. They said that they will bring forward a neonatal task force, but they took seven months to decide who was going to be on it. They said that a maternity and neonatal plan was going to be produced, and that a rapid review would produce a plan by December 2025, but it came in June 2026, almost two years after their election. The national maternity investigation brought forward two key recommendations. The first recommendation is to appoint a maternity and neonatal commissioner, which the Government have promised to do. That promise was announced over three months ago, so will the Secretary of State tell us when that appointment will be made?”
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“The new Health Secretary came into post last month and I welcome her to her place. She is right when said that “it is time to put maternity and neonatal care and safety at the top of the NHS agenda, where they belong.” —[ Official Report , 15 September 2026; Vol. 790, c. 1616.] I know that this issue is important to her and we acknowledge that the Government have made progress in some areas. They have built on Conservative work by expanding baby loss certificates—we heard from the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Cat Smith) just how important and vital those certificates can be—and they have implemented Martha’s rule, so that people can have a second opinion. I appreciate the Secretary of State is new in post, but her predecessors have acted too slowly.”
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“As a children’s doctor, I have been privileged to attend hundreds of births. Politics offers the opportunity to save more lives than doctors can across the whole country, because it has the power to make impactful change and save lives, and the Government must use it. Just over a decade ago, my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash, then the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, set a target to halve the rate of stillbirths and neonatal and maternal deaths by 2030. He did not succeed completely but made encouraging progress. Stillbirths fell by 20%, neonatal deaths fell by 20% and maternal deaths fell by a third. As my right hon. Friend himself said earlier, that means that 700 additional babies a year are waking up today and tomorrow, loving their parents and being loved by their parents, and bringing great joy.”
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“We hear many stories—we have heard many emotional stories this evening from very brave Members who have put forward their words or the words of their brave constituents. We reflect on the babies that have been lost—their first words, when they would have taken their first steps, who they would have grown up to become. We talk in sorrow and in memory. But there is also some frustration, because 13 babies every day will die shortly before, during or after their birth. So although it is important to reflect, I firmly believe that families would like us also to focus on prevention and service improvements. I shall therefore focus in the rest of my remarks on the question of whether the Government are doing all they can to tackle baby loss, and are doing so as quickly as possible.”
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“First, I must declare an interest as a consultant NHS paediatrician and a member of the British Medical Association and of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and also that I have worked in neonatal intensive care in a number of different hospitals, including Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, where I worked as a junior doctor, briefly overlapping with the initial period of the Ockenden review. I congratulate the hon. Members for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) and for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) for securing this important debate, and also charities such as Bliss, Tommy’s and Sands for their important work. As has been said, this has become somewhat of an annual debate, and it follows the same pattern.”
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“It said that last year, 97% of invasive meningococcal disease in 15 to 24-year-olds was caused by meningitis B, so I will ask the Minister some questions that I asked her during last week’s vaccine debate and have not yet received an answer to. When is she going to review and respond to the requests for vaccines for younger children who have not had them yet—the doses at 15 and the two doses for those who have not had a dose yet? What is she doing to increase awareness among people starting university in the next week or so?”
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“The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation met in July 2026 and suggested an increase in the vaccination schedule for those young people. It recommended that young children who had had one dose of vaccine should have another at age 15; that those who had not had the vaccine should have two doses; and that older people starting university should have a catch-up. Very shortly, it will be freshers week, and around 580,000 young people will head off to university for the first time with great excitement. University students are seven times more likely to get invasive meningococcal sepsis than people who do not go to university, and the Government have only managed to vaccinate 246,000 of those young people—something that the UK Health Security Agency issued a document about last week.”
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“We know that completing the antibiotic course is important. We also know that handwashing technique is important, and that keeping things clean is important, particularly in preventing the sepsis that is acquired in hospitals. Management of chronic disease reduces the risk, too, and then there is vaccination. Meningitis B is possibly one of the most scary infections and conditions that one sees as a doctor, because it progresses so quickly—and it can cause brain damage, amputations and death—but there is a highly effective vaccine, which was introduced for infants born from the middle of 2015 onwards. However, as the outbreak in Kent, Dorset and Berkshire showed last year, when three young people died, it can still come back in older children.”
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“I want to mention group B streptococcal infection, which I have seen in paediatric practice, particularly in babies. It is a common bacteria that lives harmlessly in the gut or lower reproductive tract, but there is a risk that it can enter the bloodstream, causing neonatal sepsis when passed to newborns. The GBS3 trial is looking to prevent and reduce the impact of group B strep, and the Government’s framework commits to supporting that. Could the Minister tell us more about how the Government plan to do that? I also want to talk about prevention, which the Government have said is one of their big shifts in medicine. Some sepsis can be prevented or reduced, and research has shown that, for example, if ibuprofen is given to children with chickenpox, it increases the likelihood of their developing sepsis.”
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“Talking about the workforce, the Government decided to ditch the previous Government’s NHS workforce plan to create their own, which is of course their right. However, their replacement was originally due to be published in early 2025 and was most recently promised as “imminent” just before the summer recess, but we are now well into September 2026 and there is still no plan. The Minister in the other place was asked for more details about the workforce plan, but her written answer simply stated that the Government “will provide an update on the 10 Year Workforce Plan in due course.” Could the Minister please update us on when this plan is going to be published, preferably with a date rather than an expression of “soon” or “imminent”?”
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“So someone was watching to make sure he was safe, and I am so glad that was the case, but it is so very rapid, as others hon. Members have testified. There is no single test. There is no single thing we can monitor or measure that helps. Flu-like symptoms mimic many other common illnesses, and on top of that, as we have heard, diagnosis and treatment are absolutely time-critical. The UK Sepsis Trust has developed the sepsis six—oxygen, cultures, antibiotics, fluids, lactate management and urinary output monitoring—and all these should be carried out within the first hour. The Government’s MSF commits to rapid diagnostic tools and more advanced genomic sequencing. What infrastructure and workforce investment is required by the Government to set this up, and over what timeframe do they envisage that it will be achieved?”
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“I remember seeing a patient whose mum had got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom—not something she did normally, and she was not quite sure why she had on that particular night—and when she was walking back along the landing, she thought, “It’s a bit cold—I’ll just check.” She checked her son had his blankets on and was warm, but as she did so, just in the light from the landing she spotted a little mark on the little boy’s leg. She turned the light on, and saw that he was developing the rash, which does not blanch, that goes with meningococcal sepsis. She brought him in, and he survived and he went home well, but I shudder to think what would have happened if she had waited till she woke up routinely at 7 o’clock in the morning.”
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“That was a good start, but of course, as always with medicine, there is more to do, and it was pleasing to see the previous Starmer Government build on this work by introducing the modern service framework for sepsis. We have modern service frameworks for other diseases, and it seems good to have one for sepsis specifically. The guiding light of this framework is the Government’s ambition to reduce sepsis deaths by 25% by 2035, with which I think we could all agree. But simply saying it will not deliver it; it has to have a plan, and the plan has to be deliverable and funded. What funding have the Government committed to implement that framework? As we know, early diagnosis is paramount, but sepsis is notoriously difficult to diagnose and very rapid.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“As I said, raising awareness of sepsis and how suddenly it can change someone’s condition is vital, and the previous Conservative Government got the ball rolling in that regard. My right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) adopted the UK Sepsis Trust’s “Just ask ‘Could it be sepsis?’” campaign in 2016 when he was Health Secretary. The Conservatives also backed sepsis research with more than £1 billion through the National Institute for Health and Care Research. Research is important, because it will help us to improve diagnosis and treatment and to better understand why some people get an infection and it makes them a little bit ill, but some people get an infection and it turns into sepsis.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I remember sitting in this Chamber a little over two years ago—I am sure you were there too, Madam Deputy Speaker—when the then Member for South Thanet, now Lord Mackinlay, received a rare standing ovation from the House and from the Gallery as he returned to Parliament following his remarkable recovery from sepsis. His journey has been incredible, and his story has brought renewed attention to a disease that kills nearly 50,000 people every year. For context, that is around the same number of people who die from bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined. However, with attention to prevention, early identification of infection, early diagnosis, better treatments and the avoidance of antimicrobial resistance, we can reduce that number and save people’s lives.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I start by declaring my interest as an NHS consultant paediatrician, a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, a member of the British Medical Association and a mother of three children. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) on securing this debate, alongside the hon. Members for Dartford (Jim Dickson) and for Ashfield (Lee Anderson). In particular, I thank my hon. Friend for his speech, which was hugely moving. I cannot believe that it has been such a long time since his illness happened, but it is great to see him looking so well today. I express my condolences to the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) and thank her for the brave speech that she gave.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“To sum up, the Government’s ambition to reduce sepsis and sepsis deaths should be welcomed, and it is good to have the modern service framework in place. However, I am sure that charities such as the UK Sepsis Trust and families affected by sepsis would be most grateful if the Minister could provide further clarity on the Government’s road map and the funding required to reach this important destination.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗