Health worries

Are we getting the very best out of the NHS, in terms of high quality health care and value for money? The answer to this question – sadly, a clear “no” – affects every one of us. The health service deals with more than a million patients every 36 hours. Its vast budget, which has been squeezed but is still increasing, costs the taxpayer well over £100 billion per year. Plainly, we all have an interest in ensuring this is well spent.

The revelations in yesterday’s Telegraph, which showed that senior NHS staff are being paid large sums of money by drug companies that hope to win contracts, were therefore deeply worrying. They point to a culture in which the interests of patients are too often trumped by those of NHS managers. We know all too well where this can lead: to poor care and the horrors of Mid Staffs, where the goals of a broken and inefficient system ended with thousands of unnecessary deaths.

By no means does improved treatment have to mean higher spending, even in today’s fragmented health service. This week it was also reported that drugs costing just 5p a day could save the lives of thousands of breast cancer sufferers, if only red tape would allow them to be prescribed.

The NHS has no choice but to improve. As Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, recently highlighted, it faces a “triple whammy” of an ageing population, financial constraints and the rising consumer expectations of those who use it. There is no profit motive in the health service, as there would be in the private sector, but the best examples of NHS practice around the country show that patient care and efficient spending must always go hand in hand.