London: Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned Thursday that Britain’s state-run National Health Service must “reform or die”, after an independent report said the venerated institution was in a “critical condition”.
Starmer, whose Labour party was elected by a landslide in July, promised “the biggest reimagining” of the NHS since it was founded 76 years ago.
His speech in central London followed the publication of a 142-page investigation which found that the health of Britons had deteriorated over the past 15 years.
The report’s author, Ara Darzi, an unaffiliated Lord in parliament’s upper chamber, said the NHS had fallen into “disrepair” due to a lack of investment compared to peer countries, top-down reorganisation and the coronavirus pandemic.
“What we need is the courage to deliver long-term reform - major surgery not sticking plaster solutions,” Starmer said, adding that the service would take a decade to rebuild.
“The NHS is at a fork in the road, and we have a choice about how it should meet those demands.
“Raise taxes on working people to meet the ever-higher costs of ageing population - or reform to secure its future.
“Working people can’t afford to pay more, so it’s reform or die,” Starmer said.
Starmer outlined the three areas of reform for a 10-year plan to “turn around the NHS”, whose universal model is a source of British pride, despite its shortcomings in meeting demand.
He said the NHS would fully switch from analogue to digital, move more care from hospitals to communities, and be “bolder” in switching the focus from sickness to prevention.
Starmer insisted the reforms would not mean “abandoning the founding ideal” of the NHS, which is free treatment at the point of need, and added that he would not spend more money “without reform”.
‘Reimagining’
Labour dumped the Conservatives out of power on July 4 in part on a pledge to “fix” the NHS, accusing the Tories of having “broken” it during their 14 years in power.
“The 2010s were a lost decade for our NHS, a lost decade in which the Conservatives left the NHS unable to be there for patients today, and totally unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow,” he added.
Darzi’s report notes that the NHS is seeing a surge in patients suffering multiple long-term illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
It says the UK has higher cancer rates than other countries and is lagging behind in its treatment of major conditions.
It also notes that waiting lists have swelled to 7.6 million and that a tenth of patients at accident and emergency wards now wait 12 hours or more before being seen.
Darzi said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered but added that the NHS’s vital signs “remain strong”.
Just over a year ago, his Tory predecessor Rishi Sunak announced a 15-year drive to recruit more than 300,000 staff to deal with a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses.
At the time, it was estimated that the NHS would have a staff shortfall of 360,000 by 2037 because of an ageing population, a lack of domestically trained health workers and difficulties recruiting and retaining staff, in part because of new visa rules.
“The challenge is clear before us; the change could amount to the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth,” the prime minister said.
Starmer, whose mother was an NHS nurse, has spent much of his first two months in power blaming the Tories for leaving Labour a dire inheritance in sectors ranging from health to the economy and prisons.
The Conservatives, whose leader Sunak is the son of an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, accuse him of exaggerating the country’s problems as a way of laying the groundwork for future tax increases.
