Lord Crisp (CB)

My Lords, first, I thank noble Lords for participating in this last sitting before our Recess. I declare an interest as patron of Global Health Partnerships, GHP, formerly known as THET, which is what people probably know it as. GHP has received some funding from the FCDO over several years to support these sorts of partnerships; I will refer to one in Myanmar that it currently contributes towards. I understand that my noble friend Lady Prashar will refer to a recent important report from Global Health Partnerships on the recruitment of health workers from low and middle-income countries. I am delighted to know that the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and others will be referring to some of the many different sorts of partnerships, and I believe that the right reverend Prelate will be talking about his personal experience in this area. My purpose in this debate is to think a bit more strategically about this issue. I want to ask the Minister about strategy and encourage him and the department to think about how health can contribute more extensively to development and foreign policy—this is why I wanted an FCDO Minister to respond, rather than a Health Minister. The context is that the UK is one of the great leaders in health globally, second only to the USA, for example, on medical research. The UK is extremely prominent in professional education, with many innovators in biomedicine and medtech, and great not-for-profits such as Global Health Partnerships and, of course, the much bigger Wellcome Trust. I and others will be publishing a report in the next year about the global footprint of the UK in health. The UK has extraordinary reach in health, and this is the fundamental underpinning point. In our last report, 10 years ago, it was shown that 63% of peer-reviewed medical journals where there was a British author had a foreign second or third author. There is extraordinary partnership. Even as we sit here, there will be emails whizzing back and forth between researchers all over the world. We have extraordinary reach, partly because of the Commonwealth. I am sure this is true of other sciences, but I am talking about health. Let me get to my conclusion at the beginning, just to make sure that I do not get carried away by talking about the examples. The sort of things that I am talking about here cover the ordinary overseas development agenda, if I can put it like that, which relates to the benefits of supporting low and middle-income countries with their health issues. It deals with the ODA goals and the global goals. The UK also has great influence in global health policy. There is a whole set of development agenda. Another set of issues here involves how that development is delivered, and it is something that I will come back to in the case of Myanmar. It is about the ability not to go Government to Government but to use civil institutional links that exist to provide support and ultimately help to rebuild countries and rebuild peace. The third area is about UK values, and our health professionals carry those with us. That is not just about soft power. People talk quite softly about soft power, but this is about some real leverage that comes with this. Of course, we need all the friends we can get at the moment in this dangerous world. The fourth area is the commercial benefits of partnerships. I forget what it is called now, because it keeps changing, but NHS Global, I think it might be called these days, sponsors partnerships between commercial organisations and our brilliant innovators. Finally, there is the whole area of support for the NHS. It can be extraordinarily valuable to work in overseas countries and then to come back to the UK with different ideas, to see one’s own health service in different ways and to develop. I know that is outside the FCDO remit, but it is part of what I am talking about here. I invite the Minister to tell us where he thinks health fits into the wider partnership strategy of the department, and whether he thinks, as I do, that it could play a much more strategic role in foreign policy, whether we could leverage health much more effectively in foreign and development policy, and whether it would be useful for him or colleagues to meet a few people from the sector—I would gladly bring them together to discuss how the health sector could provide more leverage and support. In the last three minutes, I turn to two examples, including one that I know I have circulated to noble Lords about the awful situation in Myanmar, five years on now. Health workers were among the leaders of the original civil disobedience movement. They were targeted and they retreated to the countryside, and they needed new skills—people had to learn how to deal with bombs and bomb fragments, and nurses had to deal with bullet holes and such like, and of course health deteriorated. There has been an extraordinary response, which has come, in part, from Burmese/Myanmar health professionals in this country. It was very good that the Government allowed them to work here professionally—some of them were here already but some subsequently came. I think that is tremendous. It is also good that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has supported the approach here of dozens of Myanmar and UK health professionals providing training, with something like 290,000 consultations, training, mentorship and education activities. Over 1,600 health workers have had training or support in the past two years. A new nursing school has opened, sort of behind the lines, because we have moved on from purely a coup to a civil war—it is now a really difficult situation. There are monthly medical training webinars, with 16 groups of educators from 12 ethnic health groups and four ethnic medical schools receiving technical support. It is a tremendous voluntary effort, with some support for its underpinning from the FCDO. It is a one-off example—I hope it is a one-off example—but it shows how important this is. It is clearly important to the UK, not least because of the great history and relationship between our two countries but because the UK is the penholder for Myanmar at the UN. My second quick example concerns a group of anaesthetists. In 2012, I got some funding from DfID, as it was in those days, to support a training programme for anaesthetists in Zambia. Zambia had no way of training anaesthetists, who had to go abroad to be trained and did not necessarily come back—they stayed in South Africa or wherever. We set up a programme in 2012 which is still going, under its own steam now and its own funding, where anaesthetists from this country go out to that country for short or longer periods. These are often anaesthetists in training, and they work with the local anaesthetists, train them and, of course, gain so much themselves. In conclusion, I invite the Minister to tell me how he thinks health fits into the wider partnership and whether he believes, as I do, that we could leverage it more effectively in foreign and development policy.