The new health secretary said the service has been “wrecked” by the Conservatives and launched an independent investigation.
He has appointed Lord Ara Darzi, a health minister in the last Labour government, to carry out the review and ordered officials to hand over whatever information is needed.
Writing in The Sun, Mr Streeting said: “Honesty is the best policy, and this report will provide patients, staff and myself with a full and frank assessment of the state of the NHS, warts and all.
“It’s going to take time to turn the NHS around - we were honest about that before the election.
"Sticking plasters won’t be enough to heal it. It will require fundamental reform.” It comes after Mr Streeting declared the NHS “broken” on his first day as Britain’s health secretary.
He went on to declare the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is “no longer simply a public service department” but an “economic growth department”, because health and the economy are “inextricably linked” and improving the health of the nation can help to “drive the economic growth of the country”.
“That is a major shift in mindset,” he said. “It’s a rethinking of the role of the department.
“It also means ending the begging bowl culture, where the only interaction the Treasury has with DHSC is that we need more money for X, Y and Z.
“The starting point has got to be, ‘We will help you achieve your mission for growth and improve the prosperity and lives of everyone in this country by making sure that we are with you lockstep in driving growth’.”
[…]
Experts from the Nuffield Trust point out that Labour has inherited a waiting list for pre-planned hospital treatment of around 7.5 million in England – a 66% increase since the start of the pandemic.While progress has been made in some areas, such as cataract surgery, waits for some major surgeries have been slower to get back to pre-Covid levels, experts said.
‘We will help you achieve your mission for growth and improve the prosperity and lives of everyone in this country by making sure that we are with you lockstep in driving growth’
Call me a bleeding-heart socialist, but I’m pretty sure the goal of a heal department should be people’s well being, not the economy.
Call me a bleeding-heart socialist
You’re a bleeding-heart socialist, as am I.
The wording doesn’t sit comfortably with me but I remember an old tutor’s advice: if you are making a grant application for a project, make sure it is about the environment.
So, as cynical as it may feel, perhaps the best way to frame investing in the NHS is to give it an economic spin - a healthier population will be more productive. A lot of people would like to get back to work but their physical and/or mental health is preventing this.
I really want to ascribe good intentions to this, but I just can’t with Streeting. I don’t think everything Labour has said is insincere, e.g. I think their commitment to ‘ending the culture wars’ is genuine. But Streeting has taken £175K in donations from private health firms and spent a lot of the campaign talking about the need for increasing the role of the private sector in the NHS, so I can’t help but question his motives.
An independent review is about to find out the the NHS should be privatised…
progress has been made in some areas, such as cataract surgery
That’s because cataract surgery is quick and easy and has few complications. The private sector hoovers them all up, and consequently their stats look amazing relative to the difficult stuff the NHS is left with.
The global problem is that healthcare is costing significantly more as medicine progresses. Almost every Western health system is spending more as a % of GDP each year. The reason is that we are getting much better at treating what were previously very poor prognosis conditions. It wasn’t that long ago we had one not very effective treatment for multiple myeloma. If that didn’t work, there wasn’t much left to do. These days with have around 10+ regimens, and patients are living for much longer and going through 3, 4, 5+ types of treatment before nothing further can be done. These treatments cost up to £50k/month. But they also cost more from your doctor - who now needs to be a superspecialist and spend more time working out exactly how best to sequence your treatment, and you also need more specialist nurse involvement, and more time from day unit nurses to deliver the treatment.
I really don’t believe private is the answer. Someone here mentioned Germany has a private system. A quick look on wikipedia shows we spent $4188-5493/capita from 2018-2022, Germany spent $6290-8011 for the same time period - they spend 45.8% more than the UK. I would rather we first try matching our spending with a system we wish to emulate rather than privatise first.
The fact that I can’t get an appointment at my local GP or that it is shut on weekends, or that I can’t see a dentist locally without paying through the nose, or have to wait hours with my daughter at A&E, or that when I get vaccinated for a recent holiday I get handed a piece of paper and am told to keep it safe because in ten years time you might be asked again if you had this vaccination is a huge cause of concern.
The NHS works for a lot of people and when it does it’s great 👍. But it doesn’t work for a large number of people and when it doesn’t that sucks 😞. I welcome Streeting’s desire to improve things but I can’t see any real progress being made until we stop treating it like a religion.
