No one is denying that there are major issues facing the NHS; I saw this firsthand when I was an NHS Trauma Surgeon in Birmingham. We need to take serious, measured actions to set the NHS back on a sustainable course, reaching its patient care outcomes and delivering the service which was once deemed ‘the envy of the world’. However, Labour’s choice of words and generalisation of the NHS serves not only to damage the morale of our hard-working NHS staff, who so often go above and beyond to help their patients, but also has a worrying knock-on effect, scaring off patients from seeking medical attention in their time of need.
The NHS was built to provide episodic, acute care. Now it is heavily dominated by the management and treatment of chronic conditions. The hospital-centric model that presently exists is arguably no longer fit for the current demand on the service and we need a more preventative, community-based model which will lead to better health outcomes for patients.
For too long it has been the workforce that has risen to the challenge rather than the organisational structure itself, but it has reached its tipping point. We would be doing the NHS a disservice if we failed to have an honest debate on how we can improve it, for the benefit of staff and patients.
Labour’s commissioned Darzi Report was a poor starting point. Not only was the report rushed to only allow for 9 weeks of investigation and analysis, the report’s remit did not allow for any recommendations for improvement to be made. This politically motivated report has only further fed into Labour’s damaging use of language around the NHS. If we want an NHS fit for the future, we need to get serious about diagnosing the problems and stop playing political games. It is precisely for this reason that I welcome the opportunity to debate these issues in the House on the 7th October.
The first serious step should be an outcomes-driven approach to NHS staff pay. Pay should be pegged to outcomes and they should not simply be handed a blank cheque with no reassurances or increased performance criteria. Instead, this government has resorted to calling the NHS ‘broken’ and has irresponsibly briefed the British public that a cancer diagnosis under our NHS is a ‘death sentence’. It is paramount that the population continues to have trust in the NHS and that they continue to engage with the service; delayed diagnosis and treatment can have a disastrous effect on one’s health and even survival chances.
There is no easy fix to the challenges the health system faces with a growing and ageing population, but there is hope. With more innovation, the use of AI, continued research, and medical trials, there is the opportunity to get this right. But we must continue to trust in our NHS and the people that work in it, not talk them down. And, in return, the NHS must be willing to embrace new approaches and allow for innovation and efficiencies.
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