Jessica Toale

In his opening remarks, the Health Secretary set out our record in office on waiting times, patient experience and investment. My local area has benefited from this record level of investment. The BEACH—births, emergency and critical care, children’s health—building at Bournemouth hospital opened in March 2025, improving maternity, children’s and emergency care services. Poole hospital will this year become the largest planned care hospital in the country. Over the past month, I have been to the opening of two new mental health facilities, representing a £70 million investment in the local area. One of them, the Seastone building, is a high-intensity unit for young people, the first of its kind in our region, and it will stop young people from being sent to Manchester or Newcastle from Dorset or the south-west. I am particularly proud of the commitment to get Winton health centre back open, and we have now secured £1.3 million in investment to do that. It will open in the summer and will bring care closer to my community and alleviate pressure on our local GPs. I have not met a person in the health system, in education or in the community who does not agree with the NHS 10-year plan’s ambition to move the health system from treatment to prevention and to get more care into the community. The Bill helps us to get closer to delivering this ambition for all people. I want to talk in particular about three often vulnerable communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) spoke eloquently about the experience of children with SEND and their parents, so I ask the Minister to reflect on how the Bill helps with joined-up services and access to specialist care for those young people. HealthBus, a local charity that I support, brings direct nurse-led care to people experiencing homelessness. Their core ask has been to have access to system 1 records and local NHS historical records to better help their patients. I am grateful to the civil servants who have been helping them to date, but I ask that particular attention is paid to ensuring that the single patient record is rolled out to benefit communities who struggle to engage and get support from existing structures. We must support our elderly population to get the care they need. I met staff at Lewis-Manning hospice care this week. They have done an incredible amount of work on the number of hospital admissions that people have in their last 12 years of life. They are proposing hospice at home hubs to ensure that up-front investment can help people to spend their last days in dignity. Will the Minister provide reassurance that any frontline services that become available are put into end-of-life care as well? Finally, when this Labour Government came into office, the fundamental promise of the NHS, that it would be there for us when we need it, had been broken by decades of under-investment, by bureaucracy and by ditching reforms that had been made under the last Labour Government. I am proud of the progress to date, and I support the Bill to improve the patient experience, to put more resources into frontline services and to deliver our NHS 10-year plan, getting care closer to the communities who need it.