Starmer outlines 10-year plan to change NHS ‘from sickness service to health service’ | NHS

Keir Starmer has described a 10-year plan for the NHS based on a hospital passage to community health centers, an accent renewed on prevention and an adoption of technology, which was billed as perhaps the last chance to save the health service in its current form.

Speaking in a health center in Stratford, in eastern London, alongside Wes Street, the Secretary of Health; And Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor – who had not been supposed to appear – Starmer insisted that it would be different from the long list of renovations of the previous NHS which reach little.

“We put the resources, we put the priorities and we have the resolution to see this,” he said. “In the end, I really think that it is only Labor governments that can do so.

“I want in 10, 20, 30 years for people to look back and say that it is the government that has seized the moment and reformed the NHS, so it is fit in the future.”

Presenting the general details of the plan, a 165 -page document published under the name of Starmer spoke, the Prime Minister declared that the service in England would be moved “not to be a health service at a health service which is truly preventive – prevents diseases in the first place”.

This would imply, he said, more emphasis on areas such as early detection and diagnosis, as well as on vaccinations and measures based on lifestyle such as pharmacy-based weight loss services and measures to make supermarket food in better.

Another pillar, he said, would be to move away from a “service dominated by the hospital” to another based on community health centers such as that in which he spoke, affirming that this was necessary to reflect the progressive societal change of acute health crises on more chronic and longer term conditions.

“We will always need hospitals,” he said. “They will always be important for acute services in particular. But the disease has changed, and we have to change with it. ”

The last objective, he said, would be “a truly digital health service”, based on high-tech diagnostic and treatment options, but also a progressive NHS application, which, according to Starmer, would be “as having a doctor in your pocket, offering you advice 24 hours a day, seven days a week; An NHS that is really always there when you need it. ”

The plan indicates that the NHS is “on an existential edge” after years of negligence by the conservatives, and only the radical transformation of the work will prevent it from losing its support as a model of care funded by taxpayers.

He indicates that work last year inherited an NHS where many people cannot see a general practitioner or a dentist, the waiting lists have skyrocketed, the staff are demoralized and the results of killer diseases such as cancer are worse than in other countries.

“This is why the NHS is now held on an existential edge,” he says. With the aging of the population creating more diseases “without change, this will further threaten access and more worse results – and even more will withdraw and will become private if they can afford it.

“They will ask themselves more and more why they pay as much tax for a service that they do not use, eroding the principle of solidarity which supported the NHS. We will be condemned to poor service for the poor. ”

But health experts have challenged this analysis. Thea Stein, the director general of Nuffield Trust, said: “The government is right about the serious problems it diagnoses in the NHS, and largely in the vision it proposes to win back public faith. But we do not agree with the prophecy of extinction. ”

Although the public satisfaction with regard to the NHS has collapsed at only 21% and patients were “dismayed” by the difficulty of accessing care, supporting its founding principles – funded by taxpayers, available for all and free in use – have remained “high and resilient,” she added.

The plan does not clearly define how the modifications proposed to the NHS working methods will be implemented, said Stein. “This plan contains a litany of initiatives and the conviction that they will be the Savior of the NHS, with little details on the way in which the health service in difficulty is to provide these changes.”

Speaking before Starmer, Streetting said that urgent changes were necessary in part to see votes calling the current NHS abandonment model, an allusion apparently to the reform of the United Kingdom, which has already talked about a more based on insurance version.

“There have always been those who whisper that the NHS is a burden, too expensive, lower than the market, and today these voices become stronger, exploiting the crisis of our NHS in order to dismantle it,” he said.

“We also know the consequences of failure. This is why we cannot afford to fail. To succeed, we must overcome cynicism that says that nothing ever changes. ”

Reeves, making her first public appearance since she was seen in tears in the questions of the Prime Minister in the communes, which triggered questions about her future, only spoke briefly, affirming that the tax discipline of the government had allowed her to give more resources to the NHS.