The Prime Minister has launched the NHS Next Stage Review in a speech in London, setting out the Government’s vision for the future of the health service.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Gordon Brown:
Next summer will see the 60th anniversary of the NHS, as Ara has just said, and I think it’s an occasion not just to celebrate the national health service but to renew it for future years. And today, one year before that anniversary, is the right time to launch the first stage of Ara Darzi’s report on the future of the NHS. No British institution touches the everyday lives of the British people in the profound manner that the NHS does, and it’s not only right but also essential, therefore, that we renew it for the coming decade to make it the best that it can be, the best it can be when families face emergencies and the best it can be to respond to what I detect are people’s rising aspirations for the personal care and attention they want and deserve. The British people want an NHS that is there for them when they need it, at the time they want, with the doctors they want and the choices that they themselves want to make. So renewing the NHS is my most immediate priority in the job that I hold.
We asked Lord Darzi to set out the immediate steps we as a government must take to achieve the NHS we need, and using two decades or more or his experience as a doctor and as a surgeon, he has, as he has just told you, travelled round the country and met and talked to people in all areas about the NHS. And I believe that you will find his report a compelling vision of the future in which quality is now central to everything that we do and in which clinical evidence is at the heart of the decisions we must make about the future of the service. It makes clear that we need an NHS in which the views of yours, clinicians, and the patients and the public generally are listened to and become the driving force for future change. So in the months ahead, as local NHS organisations draw up their delivery plans for the future, we will continue to consult on new ways of giving local people a greater say over decisions on local health services.
I too have joined Ara and Alan Johnson in the visits that have taken place round the country and I too have been visiting hospitals, GP surgeries and health centres, and I’ve been listening also to what the British people are saying. They tell me, and I want to repeat this in the strongest possible terms, of their admiration for the staff of the national health service, for the doctors, the nurses and all the staff and for the dedicated work they do. But like Ara and like Alan, we also hear about the need for change.
Our vision of the NHS is an NHS that not only provides a personal service that is organised around the needs of the patient but, of course, one that is pioneering new cures for the future. And so the first thing I can announce today is that we are creating a new health innovation fund. It will be jointly financed by the Department of Health and by the Welcome Trust, it will be worth up to £100 million over the next five years, and the fund is designed to help the NHS develop and deploy new medical technology, and is therefore supporting the genius of British research and medical work in our endeavour to address the most difficult and sometimes the deadliest of diseases. And I believe that this will put the NHS in a position to take advantage of world-class British medical research. In the past, when MRI and CT scanners were developed, they were invented in the United Kingdom but the patients that first got the benefits were in other countries. This time we want British innovations not only to be invented in the United Kingdom but British patients to be the first to benefit from the next stage of medical advance. And the research that we will now fund is a record £15 billion of public money over the next ten years, and that is designed to convert breakthroughs in genetics, stem-cell research and new drugs into the cures and vaccines needed to save lives.
Now, if our great achievement of the 1940s was a service universal to all, we now need in 2007 a service that is accessible to all and personal to all built around the patients’ needs and a service that matches an NHS which is a leader in innovation and technology. So I have also heard the need for better access to GP services and to primary care. And the change I can announce today is that we will implement Professor Darzi’s recommendation and we will guarantee far better access to primary care when patients need it. Now, addressing these challenges will require both new investment in funds and intensified reform. And working together with GPs, we will increase access to existing GP surgeries so that patients can get the services they want at times that are convenient to them and therefore have more choice. Today we know that too many GP surgeries are not open out of hours or at weekends, and our immediate aim will be that at least half the GP surgeries in the country will be open for additional hours into the evening or at the weekend, and this means an additional 4,000 GP surgeries opening up during these hours. And we will go further than that. We will establish 150 entirely new GP-run health centres in our towns and cities. These will be open seven days a week from 8am to 8pm. They will be situated in easily accessible locations. They will offer a range of GP services. These will ensure more patients have access to treatment and advice at the time that is convenient to them. We want to work with the profession to ensure that these changes will guarantee a GP service at weekends and in the evenings in every area of the country.
Now, access to services is one of the basics that we need to move forward. But people also, as Ara has just said, need to feel confident that your hospital ward will always be clean, and at every stage people want to be treated not as a number but as an individual with dignity and respect. As Alan Johnson made clear last month, no unsafe care or unclean wards can be tolerated or will be tolerated. So we will give matrons new power to report cleaning contractors and safety concerns to the hospital boards and directly to the healthcare commissions. We will give ward sisters similar powers to do so. We will give them powers to order additional cleaning and send out a message that contractors should meet the highest of standards or lose their contracts. And to achieve this, we will employ 3,000 more matrons in our hospitals. We will also deep-clean all our hospitals, we’ll extend isolation wards where needed and now, on the basis of Ara Darzi’s recommendations today, we will progressively introduce more screening for all patients entering hospital. And we believe that these measures will together ensure that cleanliness in our hospitals, the safety of all patients, is a foremost priority in our hospital service.
I think an NHS personal to you and organised around the patients’ needs also means removing worry that does exist by extending the rights to screening. So as we announced last month, we’ll extend the ages for breast cancer screening by six years so it will cover all women between 47 and 73. We will extend screening further whenever there is a clinical case to do so. Whenever patients need urgent cancer treatment, the consultant can now fast-track you to test and treatment. And we will extend colon cancer screening right up the age scale into the 70s.
So you can see that we want together to make this decade the time for Britain’s health services, with all its facilities and its expertise, to lead in both developing new medical cures and applying them and in creating a new and higher standard of service. And I believe that with your support, and Alan will talk in more detail about some of the measures in a few minutes, but with your support, working together, relying on your clinical expertise, making that the central basis on which future decisions are made, I believe that we can together create a world-class NHS equipped to meet what we know are the higher aspirations of the British people. Thank you very much.
Â
delicious
digg
facebook
