The Conservatives have just published their draft manifesto for the NHS, with David Cameron citing the health service as his top priority in government.
His principles for reform are further decentralisation, accountability and transparency which he believes will help the NHS meet rising expectations.
It is worth saying that quite a lot of these proposals would meet agreement across all main parties. But it is still worth highlighting some key points.
One policy to welcome is the Conservatives’ promise to ‘unleash an information revolution’ by making detailed performance data about trusts, hospitals, GPs, doctors and other staff available to the public online. This data will need some interpreting and explaining and there are important gaps in data collection which will need to be filled – but this is an important step forward which will help patients and patient organisations appraise whether care is safe, effective and good quality. Labour has been too slow to make information like this widely available.
One policy we need to know more about is the one on new drugs. The Conservatives rightly complain about the time it takes for new drug treatments to become available on the NHS. I have blogged before about the incredibly slow take-up of Xolair, an important new treatment for severe asthma. Instead, the Tories promise to reform the way drug companies are paid ‘so that any cost-effective treatment can be made available through the NHS with drug providers paid according to the value of their new treatments.’ Cost-sharing is a good idea in principle but we need to see how it would work and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) would still need to decide what counts as cost-effective. Getting this wrong one way or the other can deny patients useful new drugs or place a cost burden on the NHS for drugs which have marginal benefit.
One policy to question, however, is whether giving patients more choice and professionals more autonomy is enough to tackle the disgraceful postcode lottery that still has too big an impact on the quality of care we receive. In my experience, there is a big difference between the attitude of health professionals who care about asthma and those who don’t. This has been reinforced by our consultation events last month on asthma and COPD. In many places, realistic choices simply do not exist for patients to go elsewhere and patients don’t get enough information to make the choices which are available. Online information is all well and good for those who use computers, but many people don’t and could find themselves being left further behind those able to seek out the best care.
One interesting feature is that this is a draft manifesto. You can email David Cameron your questions and have your say on his proposals. I suggest you do and let us know what you find.
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