London’s beleaguered NHS will be in a “very different place” in a decade, a health minister has vowed, ahead of a ‘Ten Year Plan’ to transform the health service.
Speaking to the Standard ahead of an event where more than 100 Londoners were invited to share their experience of the NHS, Public Health Minister Andrew Gwynne said the NHS was “broken but not beaten”.
He vowed ministers would clamp down on soaring waiting lists, with around 1.2million Londoners in the queue for treatment, and use new technologies to shift the health service’s focus to prevention.
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting will unveil ten-year plans for what ministers have pledged will be a transformative overhaul of the NHS next year.
“This is a 10 year plan and we're focused on a decade of national renewal,” Mr Gwynne said ahead of the consultation event on Sunday, alongside a visit to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
“And I would hope and expect that the NHS in 10 years time is in a very different place to the NHS we've inherited.
“We've done it before. Those of us that have been around the block for as long as I have, remember it in 1997 when the then Labour government came into office and the NHS was on its knees, the longest waiting times, the longest waiting lists and shocking patient experiences in many respects.
“And when we left office, the NHS was far from perfect, but it was heading massively in the right direction.”
Among the changes to feature in the plan is a shift from ‘hospital to community’, the phasing out of unnecessary letters with a single patient record, and new neighbourhood health centres to focus on prevention.
The capital hosted the largest in a series of public events on how the NHS needs to change on Sunday, with residents telling ministers and senior NHS executives of their struggles to access timely care.
Of the 1.2million Londoners on a waiting list, more than 34,000 of those have been waiting for more than a year already.
The latest data also shows over 38,000 patients waited more than 4 weeks for a GP appointment in London, as of September.
Mr Gwynne also reaffirmed a commitment to build new hospitals, with the last Conservative government announcing plans to build 40 new hospitals by 2030.
The plans are being reviewed by ministers, which is slated to include several major London hospitals such as Charing Cross Hospital and Hillingdon Hospital.
“We are committed to the hospitals program,“ he said.
“We are looking at how we can best deliver that and how we can get the resources to be able to deliver that, but it remains our commitment that we will be building the hospitals in the program. We just need to work through the finances and the phases.
“And that is a consequence of the terrible legacy that the last government left us with plans, but no money.”
Last month, the Government invited the public to submit ideas for the future of the NHS on a dedicated website, attracting 9,000 submissions.
Alongside some initial joke suggestions - such as putting beer on tap in hospitals - which have since been removed, ideas include pop-up or mobile clinics, an NHS research programme to target early prevention, and digitised records.
