Downing Street Says » Health Speech

The Prime Minister’s Spokesman (PMS) began by saying a few words on the Prime Minister’s health speech. In addition to the information given out that morning on screening, there were two further aspects of the speech that he would draw people’s attention to.

The first of these was further action being taken to overcome failure in the NHS and driving up performance, as part of the ongoing reform agenda. During 2008, Alan Johnson would be bringing new proposals for dealing with failure in the NHS.

As people knew, the Government was already legislating in the current Health and Social Care Bill, to give new powers to the Care Quality Commission, to impose fines and close down wards in the case of poor performance. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health wanted to go further, for example making it easier for strategic health authorities to remove the boards of failing hospitals and replacing the management, to give greater freedoms to foundation trusts to take over the management of underperforming hospitals and to give new powers to primary care trusts to take action against underperforming or failing primary care services, including GP services.

The second aspect was taking forward some of the themes from this morning, for instance how the Government would be taking forward what’s known as the "active patient agenda." This meant giving people more choice and more support over how they themselves can help manage their long-term conditions. Technology had made this increasingly possible and to take a very simple example at one end of the spectrum, in some parts of the country, asthma sufferers got text messages to tell them when pollen levels were high, which has had a big impact on asthma attacks.

At the other end of the spectrum, people with quite complex heart conditions were having technology placed in their homes to help monitor their conditions and that is then monitored by clinicians in hospitals, who can then intervene if something looks awry.

The Government would be bringing forward a patients prospectus during the course of this year that would set out how the Government would extend to the 15 million patients with a chronic or long-term condition, access to a choice of active patient or care-at-home options, which is clinically appropriate to them.

Asked whether the specific measures mentioned in the speech would only apply to England rather than Britain, the PMS replied that health was a devolved matter, so these measures related to England.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Monday, January 7, 2008

Health Speech

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries