Labour party conference: how to fix the NHS
Senior Researcher
Hours after entering government, Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary, declared the NHS “broken” and a recent review by Lord Darzi returned the same conclusion. People are living in ill health for longer, waitlists continue to grow, and satisfaction with NHS care is at an all-time low.
At Labour party conference, we convened a flagship panel event with Claire Ainsley, Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the PPI, Dr Zubir Ahmed MP, PPS to the Health Secretary, Stephen Bush, Columnist and Associate Editor at the Financial Times, and Dr Sonia Adesara, a GP and Interim Chair of the Fabians, to discuss what it would take to fix the health service.
Our three big takeaways…
Health must be a whole-of-society responsibility
Panellists agreed that the key test for the health system is enabling people to live healthier and more independent lives. This is partly about what the NHS does, but it’s also fundamentally about the social determinants of health, and the responsibility individuals, businesses and the third sector take for health creation.
Yet for health to be a societal ‘mission’, we need more long-term and joined-up ways of working — particularly focused on the specific health challenges that exist at a place-level. Single-year funding for providers in the VSCE sector and the overly centralised way services are commissioned were both cited as examples of where the system militates against health creation.
We still struggle on the test of delivering consistently high-quality care
On too many measures, the quality of NHS care lags behind our peers. As Sonia put it, “In many parts of the NHS, we’re not getting the basics of good quality care right”. Deaths that should be preventable, such as from childhood asthma, continue to occur and while we have a national health service, the NHS struggles to provide consistently high-quality services. At the same time, the “fixes” available the last time Labour formed a government were more obvious and were accompanied by big increases in spending. Improving care quality this time will require bolder, more imaginative action.
The shift from hospital to community means reimagining the health and care workforce
One of the three big shifts the Health Secretary has set out to achieve is from “hospital to community” care. Yet as the healthcare workforce has become increasingly specialised, the offer of working in primary and community settings has also become less attractive. Dr Zubir Ahmed MP noted that the majority of his cohort in medical school wanted to be GPs — a role that offered real autonomy and an exciting and varied caseload — that’s not the case now.
Until we reimagine the health and care workforce — making primary and community care one of the most compelling options for new practitioners — we won’t achieve a community-centred NHS.