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Health: Asthma

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Simon for securing today’s debate on this important condition. He knows that I have great admiration for his contribution to your Lordships’ House and particularly for the way in which he manages a difficult condition. A lesser man might regard it as a reason for taking it easy, but not my noble friend. As he pointed out—and demonstrated—asthma is a common condition, but no less serious for that. It affects the day-to-day choices of those who suffer from it and, by association, their families. I am pleased to report that the prevalence of asthma has started to plateau, after decades of increase. There has been a fall in death rates and hospitalisations due to asthma, although clearly, as many noble Lords, including the noble Earl, pointed out, there is a great deal more to do. We want to ensure that the improvements that have led to that situation continue. A lot of the credit for this must go to healthcare professionals for implementing and working to evidence-based guidelines and to organisations such as Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation for working as true partners of the NHS by providing information and tools to help people better to manage their condition, as mentioned by several noble Lords. We are supporting improvements in understanding asthma, its causes and how it should be treated by investing in research, as the noble Earl mentioned. He rightly listed the obvious questions. For example, we have invested £4.75 million over five years in the Biomedical Research Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’s to work on a range of aspects of asthma, including treatment for chronic asthma and prevention. Research by the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre in November 2006 found that GPs in the UK are leading the world in the efficient management of chronic disease, the use of information technology and the uptake of financial incentives to improve the quality of services. The Quality and Outcomes Framework for primary care has certainly helped to drive up performance in asthma care. Asthma UK’s independent review, to which several noble Lords have referred, has shown the dramatic impact of good-performing primary care practices on reducing hospital admissions and deaths. We are keen that those lessons should be learnt and that those practices should become more widespread. A number of new developments will have an impact on the provision of services to people with asthma. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, that the Department of Health has been leading the development of a breathlessness pathway for primary care trusts. Its main purpose is to set out the commissioning requirements for primary assessment of the patient through specialist and sub-specialist care, inclusive of diagnostic investigations, treatment interventions and follow-up arrangements for improving the care of people with breathlessness resulting from obstructive lung disease, including asthma. We hope to publish the pathway before the end of the year. I think that that is health service code for what the noble Baroness was referring to as regards patients needing to have a personal pathway available to them.