Underwhelming progress and unnerving silence from Starmer’s government...

Call To Action

It is a weird time for NHS news; in fact it’s a very weird time indeed! We might expect that, following the publication of the NHS 10 year plan last Summer, the papers would be filled with new schemes and policies from a Labour government eager to create transformational change. But… they’re not.

For example, last Summer there was a huge amount of fanfare about the potential for the use of AI in healthcare, and we were informed that it would revolutionise the way that public services run. But since then, the biggest story about AI in the NHS is probably the use of ‘scribes’ to take notes during patient consultations. Potentially helpful, but hardly ground-breaking stuff.

Starmer’s government came to power telling us all that they’d “rebuild the NHS”; and I think we can all agree that their progress has been dismal, and many of their decisions questionable.

We’ve seen them enter into a massive deal with private companies to bring down NHS waiting lists - something that’s made a lot of people very unhappy and hasn’t had much of an impact on the size of the list. And they’re now entering into a bunch of new private partnerships to create “neighbourhood health centres” - a new scheme to partner with corporate money that is ringing a lot of alarm bells.

In fact, all things considered, it’s not looking great for Labour when it comes to the NHS. Here’s my round-up of the most important recent info- and I’ll keep my ear to the ground, to inform you about what Starmer and Streeting are up to next…