A new day dawns for the health service


This highlights the fact that, for too long, the previous Labour government
focused primarily on pumping more and more money into a reactive model of
health care in which older people and patients with long-term conditions and
disabilities often only accessed care and support when they reached crisis
point. There is no dignity in admitting older people to hospital when, with
proper community support, such admissions are avoidable and care could be
provided better at home. The cost to the NHS of lost bed days and
inappropriate admissions is something we can no longer afford.

From today, a patient arriving at AE or at their GP surgery will not see a
big-bang change. Frontline health-care professionals will continue to look
after patients just as we always have done. But, over time, there will be
steady improvements in the quality of services and care available, because
from today we will see doctors and nurses being given more power to make
decisions than ever before.

We are giving responsibility for commissioning budgets to GPs. Not for
the sake of structure, but for the sake of patients. GPs understand their
patients better than anyone else, and putting them in charge will offer
greater support for patients and help reduce inappropriate hospital
admissions, particularly for the elderly. In my own county, Suffolk, putting
GPs in charge has already reduced hospital admissions of older people from
general practice by around 15 per cent because people are now being better
looked after in their own homes and communities.

It would be easy to see the Francis Report and the NHS reforms as two separate
issues. They are not. The decade of 2000-10 was a time of inflation-busting
rises in the NHS budget. Yet the events of Mid Staffs show us that money
must be spent more wisely in our NHS – less bureaucracy, fewer targets, and
more focus on better outcomes and better patient experience of care,
particularly for the elderly.

As a practising NHS hospital doctor, and as a Government health minister, I am
proud to work in a national health service that has for decades been admired
throughout the world. But it is because I care about our NHS that I
recognise that, if it is to remain the envy of the world, it has to change.
Mid Staffordshire was the NHS’s darkest hour, and the darkest hour always
comes before the dawn. As dawn breaks today, doctors and nurses will have a
much greater say in how our health service will be run and patients will be
the winners.

Dan Poulter is a health minister and a practising NHS doctor

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