Wes Streeting and the urgent need for NHS reform

England’s NHS waiting list stands at 7.2 million, and the shadow health secretary is one of them. In an interview with the sunday telegraph today, and later in the press conference, Wes Streeting is speaking openly about the NHS ‘screwing’ him. He has been trying for months to get a scan to confirm that his kidney cancer is gone. But the appointment was delayed and then he wasted his time when he showed up for the results only to find that they still hadn’t been processed.

Streeting insists that it is about ‘the system’, not the doctors and nurses who work within it. He says Labor is pledging more money and resources to the NHS, but only on the condition of better patient outcomes. His criticism of the monopoly provider has painted him as “something of a heretic” in the eyes of the British Medical Association, he says, but that won’t stop him from speaking out. “I’m just not going to let vested interests and producer interests get in the way of reforms that will deliver better patient outcomes,” he tells the newspaper.

In most other developed countries, comments like Streeting’s wouldn’t be particularly eye-catching. If the healthcare system were failing patients as badly as the NHS is, elected representatives would be expected to come out and say so. But in the UK, his comments are explosive: revolutionary for a political class that, on both the left and the right, has avoided anything but high praise for a health service that was failing patients before covid and now. is collapsing around you.

Streeting has been incorporating criticism of the NHS into its campaign speeches for a weather now willing to share his own experience with the disease to make the case that patients deserve better. The saying The spectators Isabel Hardman in September this year that she was going to become the ‘champion of the patients’ and would consider using the private sector as a ‘lever’ to help get people cared for and treated.

That said, it’s still not obvious that he has a firm plan for solutions: He repeatedly talks about revoking non-resident tax status to pay for the additional resources. This money would not only seem like pennies compared to the overall NHS budget, but also suggests that the tried-and-failed experiment of funneling more money into the system will be tried once more if Labor enters number 10.

But there’s something remarkably different about the way Streeting talks about NHS reform. She is weaving calls for more money into NHS reform, insisting that the former cannot happen without the latter. To be sure, there is growing frustration among some Conservative MPs that the NHS is not working as it should, but it is Labour’s shadow health secretary who comes out and says so.

It was around this time last year that The viewer ran his cover ‘Our NHS’, with the letters torn, bandaged and propped up, just by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, detailing all the ways the NHS had let patients down during the pandemic and failed to catch up. Healthcare spending was at record levels, and well above the OECD average now, and yet the system’s spiral was only accelerating.

At the time, the cabinet was talking behind closed doors about the disaster that was the NHS, debating the need for serious reform. A year later, the NHS was injected with £13bn to catch up with Covid, £3bn in the Autumn Declaration. However, nothing serious has yet been said publicly about the reform. Little has changed, other than access to treatment and care has further diminished for patients. But there is another change: the rise of a Labor MP, willing to speak out, increasingly, about the profound injustice of the system to patients and workers. There are no signs of him backing down anytime soon.