OPINION
Wes Streeting: 'The NHS is broken, but it’s not beaten' (Image: Getty)
When we think of ‘bureaucracy’ we may think of delays, time wasting, and complicated processes, where progress is slow, and no one seems to be in charge. The bureaucracy that supports our NHS frontline cannot be this, it must be transparent, agile, flexible and accountable with clear leadership.
Lord Darzi’s independent investigation into the national health service said the 2012 top-down reorganisation of the NHS was “a calamity” on a scale no one had ever seen before. Working as an NHS manager at the time, Andrew Lansley’s vandalism inspired me to change careers and go into politics.
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Three hundred new NHS organisations were created as a result of this new “independence”, but for what? Instead of creating the freedom to deliver better services for patients, it “imprisoned more than a million NHS staff in a broken system” for a decade.
So now we’re springing the locks on a bad idea. There are more than twice as many staff working in NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care today than there were in 2010.
That’s double the number compared to when the NHS delivered the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction levels in its history. Now patients receive worse NHS care at greater cost to the taxpayer than ever before.
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And when the budget for NHS England staff and admin alone soars above ￡2billion, a big chunk of that must be better spent on frontline health services instead.
It’s why the Prime Minister announced last week that NHS England will be abolished to cut this shockingly wasteful duplication and brought back into the Department of Health and Social Care.
By taking this bold step, we’ll be delivering on our Plan for Change to rebuild the health service by freeing up hundreds of millions of pounds to be spent on frontline services.
But it’s not like we haven’t already started. It’s not even been a year of this new government, but we’ve already delivered two million extra appointments 7 months early.
We’ve cut waiting lists five months in a row. We’ve sent crack teams of top doctors into hospitals to get sick Brits back to health and back to work, where they’re cutting waiting lists twice as fast as the rest of the NHS.
These incredible clinicians have developed new ways of working to deliver far more procedures, running operating theatres like formula one pit stops to cut down on wasted time between operations.
At East Lancs Hospitals Trust, a “super clinic approach” to heart scans has reduced waiting lists from around 2700 patients to about 700, with a higher number of patients having scans within six weeks.
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Time saving, money saving, life saving. And there will be even more benefits from bringing the NHS home.
Blasting away layers of bureaucracy means getting cutting-edge tech and lifesaving medicines of tomorrow into the hands of staff and patients faster.
It’s exactly the kind of ambition the Prime Minister set out in his Plan for Change speech—putting patients first, cutting waste, and making the NHS fit for the future. And we’re delivering on that vision.
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It’s proof that slow and steady doesn’t always win the race.
As my boss, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, is fond of saying, “the NHS is broken, but it’s not beaten.”
Bringing it back into the democratic fold can only speed its recovery and deliver a health service fit for whatever the future holds.