The shadow health secretary has accused the NHS of using every winter crisis and challenge it faces as an excuse to ask for more money.
Speaking on a visit to Singapore, Wes Streeting said the health service needs to accept “money is tight”, and that it must rethink how the care it provides could provide better value for money for the taxpayer.
“I think people working in the NHS and the patients using the NHS can see examples of waste and inefficiency,” he told the Sunday Times. “I don’t think it’s good enough that the NHS uses every winter crisis and every challenge it faces as an excuse to ask for more money.”
He added: “The NHS is going to have to get used to the fact that money is tight and it’s going to have to get used to switching spend, and rethinking where and how care is delivered to deliver better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money. At the moment, I think we get the worst of all worlds, which is poor outcomes alongside poor value for taxpayers.
“I’m willing to give people more freedom to innovate and create as long as they deliver. That’s the tough love that people can look forward to if I become the health and social care secretary.”
The MP for Ilford North has previously said the NHS is not the “envy of the world”, and that the health service has been experiencing a deterioration of the care it provides owing to years of underinvestment.
Labour has pledged to double the number of CT and MRI scanners in hospitals, and to cut NHS waiting lists in England by funding 2 million more hospital appointments a year.
Streeting went on to compare the NHS with Singapore’s health service, saying that he wanted to replicate the country’s approach of using technology, data, and population-level health interventions to ensure the survival of the UK’s own health system.
He added: “What a contrast to back home, where I think patients in hospital don’t really know what’s going on. I definitely think there is an institutional and structural problem in the way the NHS works. It claims to be patient-centred, but it really isn’t.”
One feature of the Singaporean health system that he would like to see reintroduced into the UK is for it to be the norm for patients to have a single family doctor, a system he says has been destroyed by the Conservative government.
“The irony is that in Singapore we have a government that is seeking to move towards a family-doctor relationship. In the UK, we’ve got a Conservative government that’s moved our country away from it, because we don’t have enough GPs, and the GPs we do have are tied up in a whole load of red tape that makes them miserable,” Streeting said.
He added one of the first pieces of legislation he would bring forward in government would be on reforming the Mental Health Act in order to reduce the disproportionate number of black people who are sectioned.
