Downing Street Says » Opposition Proposals for the NHS

Asked what the government’s position was on David Cameron’s comments on introducing legislation to enshrine the independence of the NHS, the PMOS said this was a party political matter and he would not respond officially to the leader of the opposition. The factual position was that the government had transferred eighty percent of the health budget to the front line. In terms of practitioners in the health service we had given primary care trusts greater operational independence. We had reduced the number of centrally imposed targets. But there was a balance to be struck between on the one hand giving people the operational independence that they needed to carry out a service and on the other maintaining the accountability of those who spent money on that service. The other key issue that people needed to recognise that was going on was not a process of financial cuts, but a process of trying to align the changes in the pattern of diseases and in the pattern of clinical treatments with the level and structure of provision. You could not freeze frame the NHS anymore than you could freeze frame the progress of medical treatment or indeed the demands of the public that treatment where possible be more locally accessible and the impact that had on where you put resources into the NHS. You could not say that the NHS as it was ten years ago was how it should be today because the nature of illness had changed. The nature of public demand for the service had changed. The nature of medical technology had also changed. Therefore you had to reconfigure the NHS to fit modern day medical reality.

Asked whether he was saying that the NHS had had more independence under this government, the PMOS said if you gave eighty percent of the budget to local managers and clinicians then that was independence. What we could not do, however, was take away the need for either the sometimes hard choices about how to configure services so that they best reflected modern day medical reality or the need to be accountable for those choices. The medical reality now was different from how it was ten or twenty years ago.

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» Monday, October 9, 2006

Opposition Proposals for the NHS

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