In 1948 a Labour government founded the NHS. My job now is to make it fit for the future | Wes Streeting

THere are moments in our national history when our choices define who we are. In 1948, the government of Clement Attlee made a choice based on equity: that everyone in our country deserves to receive the care they need, not the care they can afford.

The fact that the National Health Service was created in the middle of the rubble and the ruin of the consequences of the war makes this choice all the more remarkable. He has devoted the law and in the service itself, our collective conviction that health care is not a privilege to buy and sell, but to a right to be cherished and protected. Now he falls into our generation to make the same choice.

There have always been those who whispered that the NHS is a burden, too expensive, lower than the market. Today, these voices become stronger, determined to use the NHS crisis as an opportunity to dismantle it. This government rejects pessimistic opinion that universal health care could be offered in the 20th century but not in the 21st. The public too. But unless the NHS changes, the argument that it is not sustainable will become more convincing. It is really a change or a bust. We choose the change.

Today, the Prime Minister will launch our health plan at 10, to radically reinvent health care. More care will be available at your door and at home, with thousands of other GPs. Services and resources will be far from hospitals and the community. New neighborhood health centers[?] House of doctors, nurses, physios, therapists, tests, scans and urgent care under one roof, built around the convenience of patients.

AI technology will release front line staff from the administrator’s chore, giving them time to care. Saving only 90 seconds of data entry and notes taking per appointment would be the equivalent of the hiring of an additional GPS. For patients, Tech will make an appointment and manage your care as easy as doing your online shopping.

By treating and taking care of patients closer to us, we will reach patients earlier, to catch the disease before its empire and will prevent them first. Our plan brings together a coalition of will on public health, working with supermarkets to make healthy choice the easy choice and pharmaceutical companies to guarantee obesity for NHS patients.

The plan is supported by an additional investment of 29 billion pounds Sterling to finance reforms, the best services and new technologies.

I am sometimes told that NHS staff are resistant to change. According to my experience, they cry for it. They suffered the moral injury to go to work, spoiling their guts, to leave at the end of the day, feeling exhausted and demoralized by the conditions under which the patients are treated due to circumstances independent of their control.

I spoke to a nurse in a community clinic who told me that she spent more time filling out forms than seeing patients. That’s not why she joined the NHS. We have to release our staff to do what they do best – worry about it. They are the ones who lead innovation on the front line, and their fingerprints are everywhere in this plan.

To succeed, we must overcome cynicism that says that “nothing never changes”. We know that change in our plan is possible because it already happens. We have visited the country and spotted the world for the best examples of innovation and reform. If Australia can effectively serve communities living in distant outbacks, we can meet the needs of people living in rural and coastal England. If community health teams can go door to prevent poor health in Brazil, we can do the same in Bradford. We know that we can build the “neighborhood health service” because the Cornwall, Camden and Northumberland teams are already showing us.

Since July, we have already started to turn the trend. We promised to offer additional 2M elective meetings during our first year – we delivered 4 m and counting. Thanks to our change plan, we have taken almost a quarter of a million cases from the waiting list.

Science is on our side. The genomic revolution, AI, automatic learning and megadata offers a gold opportunity to provide better care for all patients and better value for taxpayers. We will take it, marry the ingenuity of the main scientists in our country with the care and compassion of health services.

Above all, we will give power to the patient. In the era of deliveries the next day, an NHS which forces you to wait on the phone at 8 a.m. to make an appointment seems ridiculously outdated. Patients don’t just want NHS service, we mean. We don’t want the same as everyone; We want care that meets our individual needs. Equality does not mean uniformity, this means that each person receives the right care for them.

This plan will give people real choices, faster answers and a word to say about how their care is provided and where. He filled the commitment of Nye Bevan in 1948 that the NHS will put a “megaphone in the mouth” of each patient and would ensure that the advantages appreciated by the privileged were available to everyone.

We know that the British people are counting on us to ensure that the NHS survives not only, but prosperous. We are determined not to drop them.

This is the plan – now it falls towards us and the 1.5 million people working in the NHS to deliver it. It will not be easy, but nothing could be worth it. If we succeed, we will be able to say with pride, echoing the remaining decades of this century, that we were the generation that built an NHS adapted to the future and to a fairer Britain, where everyone lives much longer.

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