NHS to be key election issue as Blair unveils pledge
pharmafile | February 15, 2005 | News story | |Â Â Blair, NHSÂ
Tony Blair has signalled Labour’s record on the NHS will be one of the key issues on which it will fight the forthcoming general election, promising faster and better treatment if it wins a third term.
The party unveiled its updated pledge card which promises to deliver improvements in six areas: the economy, health, education, crime, asylum and immigration, and child care.
Speaking to delegates at Labour’s spring conference in Gateshead, the Prime Minister announced that it would continue to cut NHS waiting times and increase patient choice.
He also sought to differentiate his party’s approach to managing the NHS from that of the Conservative party, claiming there was a clear ‘philosophical divide’ between them.
In his last set-piece speech to the party before the election the Prime Minister pledged: “No-one waiting more than 18 weeks, guaranteed, for hospital treatment, with choice over where and when, in an NHS free at the point of need.”
Despite his optimism about the NHS, the Prime Minister appealed to traditional Labour supporters not to underestimate Tory negative campaigning, suggesting that “disillusion and cynicism” could see them enter office “through the back door”.
Dismissing the Conservative’s approach to the NHS as “backward” he said it would drain money from the system that ensured provision for everybody free of charge to a private sector available only to those who could afford it.
“I never want that philosophy in charge of the NHS,” he added.
The ideological split between the two main parties over NHS policy was also highlighted by Chancellor Gordon Brown, also speaking at the spring conference, who said that every family in the country would be “at risk from the Tory policy to walk away from the National Health Service”.
The Chancellor said the Conservative’s policy required patients to pay for operations, claiming their proposed voucher scheme “will cover only half of the cost”.
He claimed Labour’s reforms were “making a difference to people’s lives”, citing its success in reducing the number of people waiting over nine months from nearly 120,000 in 1997 to just 306 today.
“Look at our progress on heart surgery,” he added. “By the end of this March 2005, no one will wait more than three months a goal originally scheduled for 2008.”
Conservative Party co-chairman Liam Fox, reacting to the Prime Minister’s pledges, said: “Tony Blair promised to make it [the NHS] better but still we have one million people waiting for treatment and filthy hospitals with 5,000 people dying every year from hospital acquired infections.”
Fox ridiculed the pledges as “utterly worthless” and said it was too late for him to mend fences with the people.
The Liberal Democrats said cutting waiting lists was also top of their priorities, with leader Charles Kennedy saying it was a scandal that waiting times for diagnostic tests were not currently recorded.
The Lib Dems’ leader said he also wanted to remove centrally imposed targets, and earlier this year said that Labour could not resist micro-managing the service, despite pledges to allow frontline clinicians to take charge.
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