Coffey’s reforms could cure NHS’s never-ending crisis
HEALTH Secretary Therese Coffey is promising a “laser-like focus” on the needs of NHS patients, including seeing GPs within two weeks. The never-ending crisis of our health service needs more practical solutions and no-nonsense Coffey is determined to deliver them.
A shortage of doctors will be addressed by reforming the pension taxes that sees them retiring earlier so their pension pot is left intact.
A recent British Medical Association survey revealed that 72 per cent of their members retire early, with pay cuts and punitive pension taxation being the biggest drivers of this.
It costs a lot to train a doctor – estimated at £230,000 by the Department of Health – and to lose these experts to early retirement or a preferred parttime work-life balance is not sustainable.
Coffey wants to see more medical practitioners, such as pharmacists, given the authority to write prescriptions, thus reducing the work load on GPs. In return, the health secretary demands that patients be given an appointment with a GP within two weeks or sooner, or the same day if necessary.
The number of patients facing over two-week waits to see a GP has risen from 3.1 million people last year to 3.9 million this year – one in seven patients in the UK.
SHE ALSO wants to end the 8am rush to make an appointment by deploying better phone systems and more support staff to ensure more calls are answered. Hopefully bringing an end to “you are the 16th person in the queue” scenario. Failing surgeries will be named and shamed on public lists.
Too many elderly patients are kept in hospitals because there is no social care provision for them, thus blocking beds and clogging up A&E. Coffey has managed to secure some £450million for increases in social care in order to discharge patients earlier.
Just like the police force where too many officers have become default social workers in order to tackle law breakers with mental health issues, so the health care system has become overburdened with elderly patients who should be looked after outside of our hospitals.
Such practical decisions will hopefully help the NHS reduce the waves of panic that seem to overcome it in winter.
We pay an awful lot of money for our supposedly free health service – up to £170billion of taxpayers’ money for 2022/23 – and yet we don’t always get the tip-top service we think we have. A 2019 report found that 5,500 patients had died over a three-year period because they spent too long on a trolley in A&E before a bed could be found. An earlier report revealed that NHS patients are 45 per cent more likely to die in hospital in the UK than in the US and that Britain compared poorly with other countries around the world.
Of course, this was all before the Covid-19 pandemic brought greater stress to the hospital system and resulted in waiting lists getting even longer. An Imperial College London study in 2021 found that cancer patients in the UK are one and a half times more likely to die after being diagnosed with Covid-19 than their European counterparts.
Our wonderful NHS health carers worked miracles during the pandemic but that cannot hide the fact that we are lagging behind many other nations when it comes to saving lives. National affection for the NHS must be balanced by a clearheaded acknowledgement of its faults. For too long Labour governments have just poured our money into the NHS with few improvements, so it can only be hoped that our current Conservative government has the courage to enact some sensible reforms.
ACCEPTING the reality of an ageing populations requiring more health care must see a rebalancing of our health system towards improved social care provision. That way, hospitals can make more room for patients stricken down earlier in their lives.
Stemming the exit of thousands of our expensively trained doctors should ensure there is someone to see us for an urgent appointment.
Coffey wants to focus on the needs of patients, she says, “making their priorities my priorities and being a champion for them on the issues that affect them most.”
If the Health Secretary can bring off these common sense reforms and noticeably improve our daily experience of the NHS, then she will have helped to make the oncoming winter just that little less tough.
‘We’re lagging behind other nations when it comes to saving lives’