Here we look back on a decade of record investment in the NHS.
Ever since it was created, the NHS has had to keep changing to improve care for its patients. Health care can never stand still.
Medical advances mean once fatal conditions are now treated routinely. Thousands of patients, for example, get hips replaced or arteries repaired - operations unknown when the NHS was born. Key-hole surgery has cut the recovery time in hospital from weeks to hours.
But these welcome advances don’t reduce pressures on the NHS just alter them. Increased life expectancy brings new health challenges. Managing chronic conditions over decades may be the inevitable result of life-saving treatment. A population living longer increases health demands. New drugs and treatments are expensive. New health threats such as HIV/AIDS emerge.
And patients rightly expect more from a National Health Service they fund through their taxes. They are no longer grateful, as they were in 1948, for whatever care the NHS provided. They want a more personalised service centred around their needs just as they get in every other walk of life.
By 1997, despite the dedication of NHS staff, decades of under-investment had left the health service unable to meet these new challenges. Medical staff, working in often out-dated hospitals, were stretched. Patients had too little choice. The result was an NHS in crisis with patients routinely waiting over 18 months for operations.
Over the last ten years, this position has been transformed as four reports published today from the experts in charge of heart disease, emergency care, cancer and mental health within the NHS help underline.
Investment overall in the NHS has been tripled. There are over 30,000 more doctors and nearly 80,000 more nurses. More than 100 new hospitals have been opened.
With this record investment and increased capacity has come reform to reduce delays in treatment, improve care and improve choice to rebuild the NHS around the needs of patients.
The result of all these changes is that waiting lists and waiting times have been slashed. No one now waits over six months for their operation with a target - from GP surgery to operating table - of 18 weeks by the end of next year. Waits for coronary bypass surgery have fallen from up to two years in 1999 to three months. Even in 2003, one in four patients waited over four hours in A&E. Now 98% of patients are seen within that time.
New treatment centres have been built by the NHS and independent sector which now carry out thousands of operations a week within the NHS. Walk-in centres have been created to offer advice where and when patients want it. The era of uniform, monolithic provision in health care has been ended
New specialist centres of excellence have been developed in our hospitals with the latest equipment to to make the most of medical advances. In a report published today, the Cancer Czar But at the same time, the NHS has been given the resources needed to provide much more scope for care at or close to home which is what most patients want.
Extra responsibility has been devolved to front-line professionals and to local communities, backed by new incentives and powers. While back in 1997 the very survival of the NHS was under threat, the debate has now switched to how health care within an improved NHS can continue improving.
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