NEWS: NHS declared ‘broken’

As reported by GP Online, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting admit the NHS is broken as fresh talks on junior doctor pay are set to begin this week

In his first appearance as health and social care secretary on Friday evening Mr Streeting said that patients were currently being ‘failed on a daily basis’.

‘Previous governments have not been willing to admit these simple facts,’ he said. ‘But in order to cure an illness, you must first diagnose it. This government will be honest about the challenges facing our country, and serious about tackling them.

‘From today, the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken.

‘That is the experience of patients who are not receiving the care they deserve, and of the staff working in the NHS who can see that – despite giving their best – this is not good enough.’

NHS is ‘broken’

On Saturday, during his first press conference since becoming prime minister, Sir Keir agreed with Mr Streeting’s assessment. He said: ‘Everybody who uses [the NHS] and works in it knows that it is broken. And we’re not going to operate under the pretence or language that doesn’t express the problem as it is.’

He added: ‘It’s a tough thing to hear if you work in the NHS. If you work in the NHS, you’re putting a huge amount in in difficult circumstances. It’s unrelenting.

‘But we have to be honest about this. It’s broken and our job now is not just to say who broke it – the last government – but to get on and start to fix it which is what we will be doing and Wes Streeting has already started on that work.’

The prime minister said that work on delivering 40,000 extra appointments to help clear the NHS waiting list, a key part of Labour’s election manifesto, would start ‘straight away’.

Junior doctors

One of Mr Streeting’s first moves in his new job was to call the BMA and restart negotiations to resolve the long-running junior doctors’ pay dispute. He is set to meet junior doctors’ leaders on Tuesday.

Speaking to GPonline before the election Mr Streeting said that one of his early calls would also be the BMA England GP committee chair Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer to discuss the union’s ballot on collective action and what the new government could do to improve GP working conditions ‘as quickly as possible’.

The new health and social care secretary’s first meeting with NHS frontline staff since taking up his post will be at a GP practice later on Monday, alongside NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard.

On Friday, BMA chair Professor Philip Banfield wrote to Mr Streeting offering to ‘work together to get the NHS back on its feet’. He called for a ‘mutually agreed’ new GP contract to help stabilise general practice in England.

BMA junior doctors committee co-chairs Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi welcomed the new talks and said they hoped discussions would lead to a solution to the dispute. ‘As we have always been clear, only a credible offer, acceptable to our members, will end this dispute and we hope this will be made by the new government as soon as possible,’ they said.

However, Mr Streeting also said that the problems in the NHS could not be fixed ‘overnight’.

‘It will take a team effort,’ he said. ‘It will be the mission of my department, every member of this government, and the 1.4 million people who work in the NHS, to turn our health service around.’

Before the election Mr Streeting warned that pay restoration for junior doctors would not happen immediately and that under a Labour government it would ‘be a journey, not an event’.

On Friday GP leaders called on the new Labour government to make general practice a ‘day one’ priority and take steps to address the workload and workforce crisis.