06.06.14
Confed: Burnham outlines national info campaign on NHS change
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has suggested a nationwide information campaign and leaflets to every home to explain the changes that are needed to the NHS, hospitals and care.
In his keynote speech at the NHS Confederation annual conference and exhibition in Liverpool today, Burnham said the lack of public awareness and knowledge about the challenges facing the NHS and the potential improvements to care that can come from service transformation are a huge barrier to change. People’s – and politicians’ – instinctive reaction is often to defend a well-known service or building or facility, even if an alternative could actually improve care or bring it closer to people’s homes. Such a leaflet would set out the new standards of personal, integrated care each person can expect and where they can find it – but explain truthfully that this might mean changes to services they’re familiar with.
Burnham did not come to the conference able to offer big promises of extra cash under a Labour government: instead, he said that the NHS must keep getting more efficient, and must fix broken and outdated models of care. Until it does that, money will be wasted, he said, and he could not “look his constituents in the eye” and tell them they had to be pay more tax for support the NHS in those circumstances.
Burnham repeated his messages that ‘competition breeds fragmentation’ and his vision of ‘people before profit’, while also dropping hints that medical workforce training needs to change radically and quickly, with a new emphasis on generalists working across tradition acute/community or primary/secondary boundaries.
He attacked the Better Care Fund by saying it is rushed and “might get integration a bad name”, since it seems to many like an old-fashioned transfer of funding from the NHS to a struggling local government sector, with not enough bold thinking and true integration.
He referenced Norman Lamb’s speech this morning and the references in that to pooled budgets and joined-up commissioning, and appeared to welcome that, and also praised the “outstanding, seminal” review into whole person care, commissioned by Labour, by Sir John Oldham.
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