Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made a lot of promises about the NHS. Before he got into power, he talked about slashing bureaucracy, introducing AI and improving patient autonomy. While he claims to have made progress in the last nine months, is it enough?
As Katy Balls and Michael Gove say in their interview with the Health Secretary for this week’s issue, Streeting is keen for more ‘responsive and entrepreneurial’ healthcare. He wants a devolved approach that means healthcare services across the country could better deal with local problems in a personalised way. In many ways, this aligns with the ‘personalised medicine’ approach that most healthcare services look towards, incorporating what medicine at the moment is capable of – using modern science to target particular types of disease while filtering patients to the right system.
Slashing bureaucracy is a clear aim for medics and, luckily, it’s also a priority for the Health Secretary. He has already scrapped NHS England, and Streeting is straightforward about how he isn’t keen on the way things in the health service are being run at the moment. His move to shut down NHS England – which will see the body taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising of the health service – is another step forward in Labour’s war on NHS management. It is welcomed by doctors across the UK.
‘Patient power’, the Health Secretary says, is a key consideration. He wants patients to understand that no matter where they stand on a socioeconomic level, they are able to access good care – and potentially even choose what type of care they receive. That is a luxury in the NHS – but as welcome as Streeting’s dreams are, they possibly overlook the fact there are hundreds of thousands on NHS wait lists and that currently the way the system works doesn’t help those most in need.
Doctors are in favour of Streeting’s plans – many think, on the whole, that he is a pragmatic, intelligent health secretary – unlike those they have dealt with in recent years. Yet medical graduates who want to work in certain parts of the UK are denied that access. Meanwhile qualified doctors aren’t able to get into specialities they’ve trained and passed exams for, which encourages highly intelligent people to take a break from the profession. In saying all that, doctors in the private sector applaud Streeting’s plans – in many ways, they mirror this sector. ‘If he can manage to make the NHS work in an entrepreneurial way,’ one medic said, ‘he’s turned it around a corner.’
Streeting is keen that ‘devolution is at the heart’ of his reformed NHS. He wants a smarter, stronger, more efficient system. But while most medics would agree with Streeting’s approach, they also want to see better appreciation for the workforce that will make that happen. A plan that sees medics in a better place to look after patients is all that doctors want. If Streeting’s plans can see this happen within the next five years – crucially, with the right people in the right place – he may help pull Labour up in the court of public opinion.
