Gordon Brown announced yesterday that the National Health Service would become preventative as well as curative. Actually, this is precisely what Labour promised in 1943 in its pamphlet which originally proposed "A National Service for Health".
Item 2 of the section describing the "The Medical Service that we need" (and which the National Service for Health would provide) began:
(2) Preventive as well as curative. It must be equipped for preventing avoidable damage to the intricate working of body and mind, and for promoting the full flowering of every man's and woman's physical and mental strength; it must be positive as well as negative, helping those who are fit to keep fit, and those who nearly fit to become fully fit.
I expect that some extra testing will indeed take place as a result of Mr Brown's initiative. But this is spinning while Rome burns. The NHS is providing an inadequate curative service, as previous postings in the NHS category have described. There is something grotesque, in the circumstances, about creating new services which will, inevitably, take money away from other areas of the NHS which might have a more important role in the health and well-being of people. Physiotherapy will be even more stringently rationed. Cancer drugs will be more rationed. Care for the elderly will be even worse and so on and on.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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To be fair, James, all medical services provide an inadequate curative service, it's just that the NHS is even worse than most others. The primary factors in health for the great majority are sanitation, housing, diet and exercise - none of which has anything to do with medicine. Even in areas where medicine does help the majority of the overall benefit is for relatively straightforward and cheap treatments.
So why did Brown ever think it was worth funding a huge increase in spending on the NHS, enriching medics in the process? What were we ever really likely to get for our money?
Now he's going to spend more money on the NHS concentrating on prevention. How are they going to do this, since most preventative measures are entirely unrelated to medical expertise? Screening isn't prevention.
Why is our money being wasted in this way?
Posted by: HJHJ at January 18, 2008 02:50 PM
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Be fair to poor old Brown. He's an incompetent, clueless socialist who desperately needs change and new initiatives to survive.
What better than this latest headline grabbing spin which will fit in well with his puritanical judgemental streak. Nulab could easily spend another decade promoting these preventative initiatives in the NHS, and when it inevitably fails all Brown or his successor will have to do is blame us for our unhealthy lifestyles, and impose more lifestyle taxes.
Brown is onto a winner here.
Posted by: John East at January 9, 2008 11:50 AM