Rishi Sunak admits NHS faces long-term challenges after damning report UK politics live

PM likely to be questioned during Nottingham visit on King’s Fund report that says NHS is ‘more a laggard than a leader’

Helen Whately, the social care minister, was the voice of the government on the airwaves this morning and, when asked about the King’s Fund report (see 9.28am), she did not seek to contest its findings. On the Today programme, asked if she accepted that for many cancers, and for conditions such as strokes, outcomes in the UK were not as good as in many comparable countries, she did not challenge the premise of the question. Instead she replied:

We know there are conditions and cancers, for example, and other major conditions like heart disease where, if only we could diagnose and pick these things up earlier, we can help people have much better outcomes.

And that is one reason we are moving to a more integrated healthcare system, with areas across the country looking across whole populations to be able to intervene earlier and support people more preventively and [provide] earlier treatment.

One thing we are working on right now as a government is our major conditions strategy.

It is looking at the big killers across the country, that includes cancer and heart disease, and coming forwards with the things we can do to really move the dial on how effectively we manage to prevent, diagnose and treat people with these conditions.

I will challenge that and one thing I would say is, on our commitment to bring down the waiting times, we have made real progress in bringing down some of the longer waits that have developed following the pandemic.

The UK has below-average health spending per person compared to peer countries. Health spending as a share of GDP (gross domestic product) was just below average in 2019 but rose to just above average in 2020 (the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, which of course had a significant impact on the UK’s economic performance and spending on health services). The UK lags behind other countries in its capital investment, and has substantially fewer key physical resources than many of its peers, including CT and MRI scanners and hospital beds. The UK has strikingly low levels of key clinical staff, including doctors and nurses, and is heavily reliant on foreign-trained staff. Remuneration for some clinical staff groups also appears to be less competitive in the UK than in peer countries …

People in the UK receive relatively good protection from some of the catastrophic costs of falling ill. Relatively few core NHS services are charged for and certain population groups are exempt from charges. But financial protection is weaker for some services, such as dental care, and there is growing concern that people in the UK may be forced to choose between funding their own care or enduring longer waits for treatment.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/DAJS92y