Prime Minister stands by radical NHS shake up
pharmafile | May 17, 2011 | News story | | Health and Social Care Bill, NHS reforms
Prime Minister David Cameron is standing firm on the government’s planned restructuring of the NHS despite mounting opposition.
Cameron was speaking at Ealing Hospital in West London to defend his beleaguered reforms.
“It is because I love the NHS so much that I want to change it. It needs to change to make it work better today and it needs to change to avoid a crisis tomorrow,” he said.
“There is a case for reform that we have to make, a case for change in our NHS in order to meet the challenges and the whole Cabinet is united behind that.”
Both Cameron and his health secretary Andrew Lansley, the architect of the reforms, have found themselves under increasing pressure to amend the Health and Social Care Bill.
The reforms are looking to pass 60% of the NHS budget to GPs and remove the current management system of primary care trusts and strategic health authorities.
But doctors’ groups, including the Royal College of GPs and the British Medical Association, have come out against the plans saying they are unworkable and rushed.
Difficult passage
Such is the level of ill feeling against the reforms that the government halted the passage of the Bill on 4 April.
During this two-month ‘pause’ it is carrying a ‘listening exercise’ on the reforms to hear concerns from within the health service at events across the country.
But many within the NHS, who have been unable to attend its events due to poor information, have seen this exercise as a token gesture.
The Department of Health has declined to seek more coverage for the exercise and recently told Pharmafocus it would not be releasing any details of its planned events to the press.
It is set to get even tougher for the Conservative’s as their coalition bedfellows, the Liberal Democrats, have decided to focus their newfound ‘muscular liberalism’ against the reforms.
But Cameron said he didn’t see this debate as the Liberal Democrats saying one thing and Conservatives saying another, adding that he was probably the ‘keenest member of the government’ in making sure the NHS reforms work.
He said that there is only one real option and this is to change and modernise the NHS in order to make it more efficient and more effective.
“We save the NHS by changing it – we risk its long-term future by resisting change now,” he concluded.
Ben Adams
Related Content
Hospitals on ‘brink of collapse’, warn doctors
Hospitals across the UK are struggling to cope with emergency admissions, and a doctors’ group …
Storm clouds gathering over the NHS, say its leaders
NHS managers are using their annual conference to criticise the government’s savings programmes. The government …
Risk register spells out NHS reform risks
A leaked document that assesses problems with the government’s reform of the NHS has been …
