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Labour’s plans for NHS meet strong protest

Cancer, heart disease, mental health and care of older people are to be the major priotities for the NHS, according to Alan Milburn, who continues as health secretary in the new Labour administration.

Mr Milburn also wants the NHS to focus on improving family doctors services, greater integration of emergency care and cutting waiting times for treatment – while targets for waiting lists have been dropped.

But Labour has quickly run into fierce criticism on two fronts. Proposals to increase the involvement of the private sector in health care, through the use of commercial clinical services, private sector management and finance in the NHS, have met with a storm of protest from many bodies, including Unison, the Royal College of Nursing, the Medical Practitioners’ Union, and the NHS Consultants Association.

‘Labour’s faith in the private sector is not grounded in any firm evidence’, according to Allyson Pollock, professor of health policy at University College London, who pointed out that over the years the NHS has ‘picked up the pieces of poor private sector performance’. Last year there were 142,000 admissions from private hospitals to NHS care.

Private sector efficiency is also unproven, says Professor Pollock. ‘Evidence from the US shows that privately managed hospitals are inefficient and spend 34 per cent on administrative costs, compared with 12 per cent in the NHS as a whole’, she said.

Labour has also come under fire for apparently neglecting public health strategy, which was far more prominent when it first came to power in 1997. The minister of public health post which it created at that time has since been downgraded, the national strategy Our healthier nation has received little recent ministerial attention and funding for health action zones and the brand new health development agency has already been cut.

In a letter to healthmatters (see page 24), Klim McPherson, professor of public health epidemiology at the London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine, argues that the government ‘just seems oblivious’ to the public health policy commitments it has made.