Wes Streeting and the urgent need for NHS reform

The NHS England waiting list stands at 7.2 million – and the shadow health secretary is one of them. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph today, and subsequently on the media round, Wes Streeting is speaking openly about being ‘mucked around’ by the NHS. He has been trying for months now to get a scan to confirm his kidney cancer is gone. But the appointment was pushed back, and then his time was wasted where he showed up for the results and discovered they had not been processed yet. 

Streeting insists this is about ‘the system’, not the doctors and nurses who work inside of it. He says Labour is pledging more money and resources to the NHS, but only on the condition of better results for patients. His criticisms of the monopoly provider have painted him as ‘some sort of heretic’ in the British Medical Association’s eyes, he says, but that’s not going to stop him from speaking out.