Launched in 1948, the National Health Service is the United Kingdom’s greatest achievement, and it is not possible to overstate the significance of the NHS over the last seventy-plus years. Universal healthcare has saved so many, and it continues to transform the very existence of millions of people.
This was never truer than right now as medical professionals, and their support staff, dedicate themselves so determinedly in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
I was therefore somewhat surprised that, at this most difficult time, the Health Secretary has announced plans for a wholesale reorganisation of the NHS which, it has been reported, will do away with the structural reforms of previous Conservative Governments.
It is clear than the changes will centralise power into the hands of government ministers with Matt Hancock announcing that “the Secretary of State will be empowered to set direction for the NHS and intervene where necessary.”
He has claimed that the changes will do away with “irksome bureaucracy,” though one prominent GP, Anne Robinson, was quick to point out that “every major NHS change” that she had experienced in a 30-year career had “promised less bureaucracy and delivered more.”
Many people, myself included, will undoubtedly be nervous of yet another political reorganisation of healthcare, and I agree with the British Medical Association that such a “sweeping reorganisation” should not be rushed through while medical staff “are still tackling the winter surge in infections, hospitalisations and tragically, deaths.”
I understand that the proposals include an end to competition rules, which presently dictate that all contracts must be put out to tender. This could be positive if, as argued by the BMA, the NHS itself is always the “preferred provider for NHS services,” and the rules also ensure that out-sourcing to large corporations “at huge expense to the taxpayer” is no longer the norm.
The Health Secretary is speaking about “better connectedness between health and social care,” though one prominent health policy academic, Professor Sir Chris Ham, has stated the plans do not go far enough and “will not provide the solution … because successive governments have ducked that.”
I agree that MPs are failing to take a lead on this, and central government is continuing to instruct local councils to raise council tax by 3% a year to specifically go towards meeting the rising costs of social care.
As we start the debate around the proposed changes, it seems to me that they must be informed by the expertise of medical and social care professionals, and that Westminster politicians must find significant additional resource to guarantee a health and social care system fit for the 21st century.
[This is my article in this week’s Cornish Guardian].
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