Jeremy hunt

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is correct to say that there was a ‘dramatic fall in confidence’ in alternatives to Accident & Emergency units. He says that this has built up steadily since GP contract changes in 2004. He is right of course, and who can blame him for making the obvious political point that Labour government negotiations have helped fuel this present mess? They may have caused it, but he is in power to help solve it. As a group of NHS Trusts has warned that casualty departments could collapse within six months as a result if ‘huge pressure’, any long term strategy will frankly not alleviate today’s problems. Patients

Andy Burnham summoned Jeremy Hunt to the Commons this afternoon for a shouty hour about who loves the NHS more. The Health Secretary’s answer to Labour’s urgent question on the government’s plans for changes to the GP contract and the crisis in Accident and Emergency departments was largely a direct attack on decisions the opposition took when it was in government. He decried Labour’s ‘disastrous changes to the GP contract’ which had led to a significant rise in the number of patients visiting A&E, and ‘the disastrous failure of Labour’s IT contract’. He also told Burnham that his government had failed to address the disconnect between social care and the

‘The quality of patient care will be put at the heart of the NHS in an overhaul of the health and care system in response to the Francis Inquiry.’ This is how the Department of Health opens its press release about Jeremy Hunt’s response to the Francis Inquiry, delivered in the Commons this afternoon. The government plans to create a ‘culture of compassion’. It will do this by introducing: 1). An ‘Ofsted-style ratings for hospitals and care homes’. The new chief inspector of hospitals will be the NHS’s ‘whistle-blower-in-chief’. He will also assess complaints procedures and ensure that recruitment is adequate. The chief inspector of care will ensure that the

Jeremy Hunt used his address to the Conservative Spring Forum this afternoon as the next step in his quest to make the Conservatives the party of the NHS, not Labour. His speech was in some ways quite formulaic: it started with good news about health care in this country, then praise for the ‘extraordinary’ staff working in the NHS. But then it moved on to his duty ‘to be honest about the failures’ of the health service too. He said: ‘If you care about something you don’t try to sweep problems under the carpet – you expose them, sort them out and make things better. And by criticising us when

Twenty-five years ago, when he had left the Communist party and taken over as chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Sir David Nicholson made a point of promising his staff a ‘job for life’. He has certainly stuck to his ideology. This week he admitted his part in the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, in which up to 1,200 patients died from poor care and neglect. He confessed that as chief executive of the Shropshire and Staffordshire Strategic Health Authority — the body which was supposed to oversee Stafford Hospital — he had failed to notice its high death rates. And yet still he appears to believe that he has the

Today’s Sunday Times splashes on news that David Cameron is going to crack down on health tourism – that is, foreign nationals coming to Britain primarily to claim free treatment on the NHS. There have been anecdotal reports of this for some time, but the official figures suggest that there is no health tourism problem, because the number of foreign nationals treated amounts to less than 0.5 per cent of the NHS budget. Of course, the official figures wouldn’t show a problem. The scam involves people being marked down as eligible, even though they are ineligible. Statistics are, as so often, unreliable witness. More reliable are those who work in

Jeremy Hunt has announced new plans to shift the NHS into the twenty first century by removing all vestiges of paper by 2018. While computerising health records sounds mundane and complicated, the Health Secretary has done his best to make the plans appear logical and advantageous. In his announcement, Hunt says: ‘The NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution. It is crazy that ambulance drivers cannot access a full medical history of someone they are picking up in an emergency – and that GPs and hospitals still struggle to share digital records.’ The interim stages to Hunt’s ultimate goal sound realistic. Records held

While Ed Miliband wasn’t exactly Mr Pugnacious today at PMQs, one of his better blows was when he read out the promise in the Coalition Agreement to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS’ and asked whether that would be on a list of broken promises in the audit of government achievements. Labour always sees the NHS as an easy way to score points now that the government’s hard-won credibility has been scuppered by the Health and Social Care Act, and naturally Miliband roused some cheers from his MPs. James argued back in December that it is now impossible to have a mature conversation about the NHS. Indeed, the Tories

Earlier this week my wife called to make a GP appointment for our daughter, who has been experiencing some worrying tummy pains.  Middle of next week she was told, earliest. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t call at 8 o’clock,’ the receptionist chided. ‘We had several slots then, but now they’ve all gone.’ Silly us for prioritising getting the children to school at that time of the morning. I expect that Jeremy Hunt would say that it is precisely this kind of thing – not a scandal, not a crisis, but just one of a million similar tiny rebuffs people experience at the hands of the NHS every week – that

In this week’s Spectator James Forsyth interviews new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt about how he will continue Andrew Lansley’s legacy on NHS reform. He says his ‘burning mission’ is to ‘demonstrate that we have as much to offer the NHS as Labour ever did’. But while Hunt is keen to praise the work of his predecessor, he takes a strikingly different line on the health budget. James writes: Another striking difference between them is their views on the future of the NHS budget. When The Spectator interviewed Andrew Lansley at Christmas, he was clear that he believed that the health budget would have to carry on rising in real terms

George Osborne has long regarded support for the NHS as the most important aspect of Tory modernisation. For this reason, I think it is highly unlikely that the ring-fence will be removed from around the NHS budget. But I suspect that the practical, as opposed to symbolic, importance of the ring-fence will be diluted by more and more things being classified as health spending. At a Quad meeting on the Dilnot proposals on social care, George Osborne told Andrew Lansley that the £1.7bn cost of them, which rises to £5bn within 3 years, should be met out of the NHS budget. Lansley resisted this idea. But I understand from senior

Reshuffles are significant when they change policy and not just personnel. The reason that so much attention is focused on Transport is that the decision to move Justine Greening does suggest that Number 10 wants, at the very least, more room to maneuver on aviation policy. But speaking on the Today Programme this morning, Matthew d’Ancona – the coalition’s biographer —suggested two other departments where a personnel change could be a prelude to a policy change. He said that George Osborne was keen to have new Secretaries of State in the Department of International Development and the Department of Health so that he could explore removing the ring fences round