Daisy Cooper, health spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said “years and years of Conservative failure have brought the NHS to its knees…reports Asian Lite News
The NHS in England has been “broken” by successive Conservative-led governments – and the state it is now in is “unforgiveable”, Starmer has told the BBC.
In his first major interview in Downing Street, the prime minister said a review of the health service to be published on Thursday finds changes to the NHS were “hopelessly misconceived”.
He said austerity in the coalition years, and then the Conservative government’s handling of the pandemic, left the NHS in an “awful position”. Starmer added that the review by an eminent surgeon, Lord Darzi, is expected to reveal too many children “are being let down” by the health service.
“Everybody watching this who has used the NHS, or whose relatives have, knows that it’s broken,” Starmer said. “That is unforgivable, the state of our NHS.”
In response to Starmer’s comments, shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins said after 14 years in opposition, “Labour’s instinct is to politicise children’s health, rather than provide solutions and reform our NHS”.
Daisy Cooper, health spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said “years and years of Conservative failure have brought the NHS to its knees”. She said the party has “called for an emergency health budget from this new government” and “will be pushing them every step of the way”.
The prime minister said the report will claim the current problems come from historical factors, including “hopelessly misconceived” reforms pursued by the former Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in 2012.
It is also expected to find that children from the most deprived backgrounds were twice as likely to be obese by reception age. In the poorest communities, the report finds, nearly one-in-three children is obese by Year 6. Meanwhile, the report says life-threatening and life-limiting conditions among children are up 40% over the past two decades. The full contents of the Darzi report will be published on Thursday.
Some of Lord Darzi’s report has been put out early by the government with eye-catching findings, and his conclusion that there were “real concerns” over the ability of the NHS to deliver quality care. But there will be much more in the report to be published in the next few days. What will it say, for example, about overstretched GP services? Or retention and recruitment of staff? It will undoubtedly set out more problems and challenges.
Starmer pinned the blame for the problems on the Tories, in an echo of the government’s criticisms of its economic inheritance, and argued only Labour can bring the reform the government needs. “It’s the last government that broke the NHS,” Starmer said. “Our job now through Lord Darzi is to properly understand how that came about and bring about the reforms.”
He said that started with the first step of funding 40,000 out-of-hours NHS appointments each week to cut waiting lists. There are questions over how long Labour can keep blaming the Conservatives and when scrutiny will turn to their own performance against NHS targets.
Starmer appeared to acknowledge this, saying: “We’ve got to do the hard yards of reform as well. “And as I say, I think it’s only a Labour government that can do the reform that our NHS needs, and we’ll start on that journey.”
In the wide-ranging interview in Downing Street’s Cabinet Room, Starmer also discusses the summer riots, Grenfell disaster, public finances and his upcoming second visit to the White House.
Health minister says NHS needs to make ‘three big shifts’ to survive
The NHS must undergo three “big shifts” in how it delivers care to ensure a sustainable future, Wes Streeting has said. The health and social care secretary told Financial Times the new government would prioritise moving NHS treatment “from hospital to community”, “analogue to digital” and “sickness to prevention”.
The three shifts “are absolutely necessary, and actually existential . . . for the future of the NHS”, Streeting said. “We’ve got to take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS,” he said, noting that collaboration between the health service and life sciences sector was happening but only “in exceptional cases”.
People were “living longer but . . . not living well for longer”, adding that the NHS needed to modernise and “diagnose earlier and treat faster”.
More emphasis on prevention and primary care would help ease pressure on overstretched hospitals and “push ill health and co-morbidities . . . later into retirement”, he said. Analysis published in the Lancet Health Longevity journal this year suggested that, using England as an example, more than 70,000 extra “quality-adjusted life-years” could be generated over roughly 20 years through steps to reduce risk factors for dementia, such as vision loss and high cholesterol.
The NHS in England is grappling with long waiting lists for routine care, exacerbated by the cancellation of about 1.5mn appointments and operations owing to a wave of strike action, and an ageing population.
In secondary care there were 100,658 vacancies as of March, according to the British Medical Association, the main medical union.
Streeting, in an echo of his first official statement as health secretary, said the health service was “broken but not beaten” and argued that “good social care” was necessary to achieve “the recovery we want to see” in the NHS.
Social care was barely mentioned in the general election campaign, despite the millions of people affected by England’s increasingly threadbare provision for the elderly and the disabled.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer inherited plans from the Conservative government to cap the amount individuals contribute towards their own care costs, but England’s largest councils in July warned of a £30bn “black hole” in funding for the proposals. At the end of July, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced it would not be implemented, saving the £1bn it would have cost in 2025-26.
Streeting said that while “action on social care needs to happen now”, longer-term challenges also had to be addressed, including around more complex care needs and an ageing population.
“Give us time,” he said of calls for the Labour government to move more quickly to implement its policies. Streeting said he would work with Peter Kyle, science and technology secretary, to “bulldoze through . . . institutional barriers” in the NHS to make the service “a catalyst for great, groundbreaking science made here in Britain”.
Asked about the decision by Reeves to cut winter fuel payments for better-off pensioners, Streeting said “we’ve got to get the balance right . . . and invest in our public services without always having to reach for the tax lever”.
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