High quality care for all : NHS Next Stage Review final report / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Health by Command of Her Majesty, June 2008.

  • Great Britain. Department of Health
Date:
2008
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: High quality care for all : NHS Next Stage Review final report / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Health by Command of Her Majesty, June 2008. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/92 (page 2)
    Preface By the Prime Minister The National Health Service is not just a great institution but a unique and very British expression of an ideal — that healthcare is not a privilege to be purchased but a moral right secured for all. For 60 years it has carried the support of the British people because it speaks to our values of fairness and opportunity for all and because it is always there for us when we are most vulnerable and in need. That is why it is right that we should seek to renew the NHS for the 21° century. To meet the rising aspirations of the public, the changing burdens of disease and to ensure that the very latest, personalised healthcare is available to alll of us, not just those able to pay. Over the last 10 years we have improved the basic standards of the NHS. In 2000, the NHS Plan set out to tackle the challenges which chronic underinvestment had created. Since then we have invested in 80,000 more nurses and 38,000 more doctors, including 5,000 more GPs. Access to care has improved dramatically, and outcomes have improved as a result: 238,000 lives have been saved in the last 11 years as a result of significant improvements in cancer and heart disease survival rates in particular. This report builds on those reforms and will, | believe, have an even more profound affect on NHS services and our experience of them. If the challenge 10 years ago was capacity, the challenge today is to drive improvements in the quality of care. We need a more personalised NHS, responsive to each of us as individuals, focused on prevention, better equipped to keep us healthy and capable of giving us real control and real choices over our care and our lives. Lord Darzi's report is a tremendous opportunity to build an NHS that provides truly world class services for all. It requires Government to be serious about reform, committed to trusting frontline staff and ready to invest in new services and new ways of delivering services. It is a bold vision for an NHS which is among the best healthcare systems in the world — a once ina generation opportunity that we owe it to ourselves and our families to take. | would like to thank Lord Darzi and the thousands of those who have been involved in the review locally and nationally for their contributions. As a Government the renewal of the NHS must be one of our very highest priorities and we will rise to the challenge you have set us. Ci nam Brow, Gordon Brown Prime Minister