Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made a lot of promises about the NHS. Before he got into power, he talked about slashing bureaucracy, introducing AI and improving patient autonomy. While he claims to have made progress in the last nine months, is it enough?
As Katy Balls and Michael Gove say in their interview with the Health Secretary for this week’s issue, Streeting is keen for more ‘responsive and entrepreneurial’ healthcare. He wants a devolved approach that means healthcare services across the country could better deal with local problems in a personalised way. In many ways, this aligns with the ‘personalised medicine’ approach that most healthcare services look towards, incorporating what medicine at the moment is capable of – using modern science to target particular types of disease while filtering patients to the right system.
Slashing bureaucracy is a priority for medics and, luckily, it’s also a priority for the Health Secretary. He has already scrapped NHS England, and Streeting is straightforward about how he isn’t keen on the way things in the health service are being run at the moment. His move to shut down NHS England – which will see the body taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising of the health service – is another step forward in Labour’s war on NHS management and the decision is welcomed by doctors across the UK.
‘Patient power’, the Health Secretary says, is a key consideration. He wants patients to understand that no matter where they stand on a socioeconomic level, they are able to access good care – and potentially even choose what type of care they receive. That is a luxury in the NHS – but as welcome as Streeting’s dreams are, they possibly overlook the fact there are hundreds of thousands on NHS wait lists and that currently the way the system works doesn’t help those most in need.
While medics are in favour of Streeting’s plans, there remain issues with staffing across the UK that only help to drive doctors out. Medical students are faced with a lottery system on graduation that sends many halfway across the country against any will of their own. At the same time qualified doctors aren’t able to access specialities they’ve trained and passed exams for – pushing qualified professionals to take reluctant career breaks.
The Health Secretary is keen to see ‘devolution at the heart’ of a new NHS. But while most doctors would agree with Streeting that the health service needs reformed, they also want to see him take decisions to improve retention. The Health Secretary’s vision is only possible if he can ensure the right people are in place to carry it forward.
Comments