David Cameron is planning to take a “major gamble” with the NHS by “turning Britain’s best loved institution into the world’s biggest quango”, the health secretary Andy Burnham has warned.
In an attempt to maintain the pressure on Cameron, after a high-profile Tory MEP described the NHS as a “60-year mistake”, Burnham declares that the Tories would also take the health service backwards by abandoning national targets.
Burnham writes in The Guardian that Cameron’s “bland protestations of love” for the NHS hide an approach that would threaten the improvement in health standards for the poor since Labour started to increase spending in the early part of this decade.
The health secretary highlights Tory proposals that have created what he describes as “three substantial dividing lines” between the two main parties:
1. Embarking on a major overhaul of the way the NHS is run by handing day-to-day control to an independent board.
Burnham writes: “For a party that has promised a ‘bonfire of the quangos’, turning Britain’s best-loved institution into the biggest quango in the world - responsible for a £100bn budget and 1.4 million staff - is a proposal that has had dangerously little scrutiny to date.”
2. The scrapping by the Tories of “Labour’s three flagship waiting targets”: that patients should receive treatment within 18 weeks of a referral by their GP; that all patients should be treated within four hours of arriving at an accident and emergency department; and that cancer patients should wait no longer than two weeks to see a specialist.
Burnham writes: “Now that these targets have been achieved, Labour will turn them into enforceable rights for patients. Removal of these standards, as the Tories propose, would inevitably see … a return to postcode variation.”
3. Raising the possibility that local pay bargaining would be reintroduced. “This would be a mistake,” Burnham writes. “National pay structures bring a stability to the system in terms of recruitment and retention.”
Burnham says Cameron is afraid to embark on a serious debate about the future of the NHS because he is not fully committed to it. “If you dig beneath the bland protestations of love, there is a genuine philosophical difference on the NHS between the political parties,” the health secretary writes. It needs to be debated because it will define the kind of NHS we have in 10 years’ time, he says.
“For Labour, it all comes down to defending the N in NHS. Our commitment to national standards and structures in health remains strong. Without them, the poorest areas tend to get the poorest services. The Tories are ambivalent about the role of the centre, preferring localism in health, as in other areas.”
Read more at The Guardian.
Tags: NHS independence, Pay, Targets
