Downing Street Says » Health Bill

» Monday, January 31, 2011

Health Bill

Put that the Prime Minister had said this morning that his own brother-in-law thought that hospitals would be disadvantaged by the new proposals, the PMS replied that we were conscious that we had a job to do in explaining these reforms, which was what the Prime Minister had been doing this morning.

The PMS said that the NHS was a very large and complicated system. There would be a lot of scrutiny of that system whenever it was changed. The point the Prime Minister had been making was that we could not go on as we were. Demographic change, an ageing population and the increasing costs of healthcare meant that we needed to address this.

Asked if he was acknowledging that the Government had failed to make its case so far, the PMS replied that people would not necessarily question how the NHS worked when it wasn’t subject to change.

Asked what the Prime Minister thought about the Kings Fund research that claimed the NHS was not getting worse, as some Government Ministers had suggested, the PMS replied that it was his understanding that the research had looked at what had happened in the Health Service over a long time period.

The PMS said that people would expect, with medical and scientific advances, to see our ability to treat certain diseases improve. We also had to look to the future and realise that with an ageing population and costs of healthcare going up, there would be pressures going forward for the Health Service.

Put that the research had suggested that we were getting better faster than the countries we were currently lagging behind, the PMS said that there were problems to come in the Health Service if we did not change the system. We could not afford to increase funding on healthcare as quickly as in the past. This meant that we would have to try and improve the system and the way it worked.

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