NHS must ‘reform or die’, major new report shows
A new study that was commissioned by Labour when they first came into power shows ballooning NHS wait times and delays could take longer than five years to fix.
People have ‘every right to be angry’, said Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He remarked that our national health service now has no choice but to ‘reform or die’ following new findings from a study commissioned by the Labour Party.
Lord Ara Darzi, cancer surgeon and health minister under Gordon Brown, led the report which found that the Conservative’s 14-year stewardship has left the NHS in ‘an awful state’. Darzi cites evidence he received from the body representing A&E doctors that ‘long waits are likely to be causing an additional 14,000 more deaths a year – more than double all British armed forces combat deaths since the health service was founded in 1948’.
Darzi’s report also discovered:
- The number of people forced to wait more than a year for hospital treatment which they should receive within 18 weeks has risen 15-fold since March 2010, from 20,000 to more than 300,000.
- Waiting lists in England currently stands at 7.6 million people.
- Similarly, cancer survival rates ‘slowed substantially during the 2010s’.
- The state of the social care sector is ‘dire’ and is placing ‘an increasingly large burden on families and on the NHS’.
- Health staff have become ‘disengaged’ since the pandemic and are now doing much less discretionary extra work.
- The quality of care in maternity services is a real concern.
Lord Darzi said: ‘Although I have worked in the NHS for more than 30 years, I have been shocked by what I have found during this investigation – not just in the health service, but in the state of the nation’s health.’
In response to the report, Sir Keir Starmer is promising the ‘biggest reimagining of the NHS’ since it was created, with a new 10-year plan for the health service to be published in the coming months.
So far, we know he has proposed three key areas of reform: the transition to a digital NHS, moving more care from hospitals to communities, and focusing efforts on prevention over sickness.
In addition, Keir Starmer has ruled out increasing direct taxes to boost the NHS’s budget – The Health Foundation has estimated that the NHS in England alone will need an additional £46bn by 2029.
Keir Starmer said: ‘The NHS is at a fork in the road, and we have a choice about how it should meet these rising demands.
‘Raise taxes on working people or reform to secure its future. We know working people can’t afford to pay more, so it is reform or die’.
However, shadow health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has claimed Labour have failed to come up with meaningful plans for reform. She defended the Conservative’s record, adding the NHS budget was increased during the last parliament.
‘The Labour government will be judged on its actions,’ Atkins said. ‘It has stopped new hospitals from being built, scrapped our social care reforms and taken money from pensioners to fund unsustainable pay rises with no gains in productivity.’
Image: Tugce Gungormezler
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