Conservatives are the Medicine for the NHS

The NHS is vast.  It treats over one million patients every 36 hours.  The work force is larger than the combined populations of Birmingham and Coventry.  It’s Europe’s largest employer.  Over the sixty years of the NHS there have been significant social, demographic and technological changes.  Political planning for healthcare services need to keep pace with society.  Labour can no longer defend the NHS by repeating arguments made for its creation.  The world has moved on; the Labour party has been left in the past.  The future lies with David Cameron, who has put the NHS at the heart our Conservative political priorities.      

Since 1948 the NHS budget has increased from £437 million (roughly £9 billion at today’s value) to over £100 billion in 2009.  Money has poured in, but have results kept pace?  The sad fact is that vast sums of money have been completely squandered, such as £12 billion wasted on the white elephant NHS IT system. As an NHS doctor, I have first hand experience of how taxpayers’ money has been spent on creating tick-box targets and layers of bureaucracy.  Rather like Upstairs, Downstairs,  Labour has left ‘us’ (patients and clinical staff) in the basement and ‘them’ (managers and politicians) up in the ivory tower, far away from the front line.  It’s clear from the numbers.  NHS hospital managers have mushroomed to 39,900 exceeding the 34,900 clinical consultants. 

Of course, good management is imperative.  But Labour’s love of paperwork has gone too far; siphoned money away from patient care.  Even famous manager Gerry Robinson said ‘The NHS continues to employ ever greater number of managers with no clear evidence that it is being better managed as a result.’  Hospitals are set to become more like a scene from Yes Minister, where the hospital top of the hygiene league table has plenty of record keepers but no patients.  There is no choice but to think more carefully about how and where money will be spent as public sector debt spirals to over 56% of GDP.

To examine the challenges we face in more detail, let us consider the one thing we all have in common – being born.  Britain’s booming birth rate and bursting maternity units, have led to newspaper revelations about women giving birth in corridors and lifts.  Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley MP highlighted how maternity beds have been cut by 22% since 1997.  On top of this, Britain has the worst infant mortality rate in Western Europe.  In addition, over 300 babies a year suffer brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen during delivery.  Why has the Labour Government let this happen on their watch? 

On the Continent consultant obstetricians are routinely present on maternity wards and lead complicated deliveries. This is not so in the UK, where the majority of normal births are conducted by midwives. Midwives can provide great one-to-one care during delivery. But 91% of midwives believe care has suffered as a result of rising birth rates and staff shortages.  At potentially complicated deliveries, such as caesareans, there’s only a 21% chance of having a consultant doctor present.  We know that this position will get even worse with the introduction of the European 48 hour week and the savage reduction in postgraduate training.  It may have seemed clever to budget planners to keep costs down by not having consultant cover and insufficient maternity nurses.  However, charity Scope has estimated that 13,000 people are affected by brain damage caused by avoidable birth trauma.  In reality, it has cost us all.  It costs more money, it costs quality of life and it costs the lives of babies.

Conservatives are needed to prevent Labour’s top-heavy bureaucracy toppling the NHS.  The medicine: responsibility, transparency and accountability.  Responsibility and trust returned to clinical professionals to put patient care back at the heart of the NHS.  Accountability aligned to responsibility.  Transparency returned to a local level.  People need to get more involved.  Tough decisions must be made about how to distribute finite financial resources to deliver quality patient care.  It’s your health, so the NHS should be your service.