As Keir Starmer fights to address the NHS crisis, sweeping reforms will see patients treated by general practitioners (GPs) rather than receiving specialised treatment in hospitals.
Routine appointments will be dealt with in community services close to patients’ homes in a move they believe could ‘fix the waiting list’.
The health service will also ramp up technology, meaning patients will have fewer in-person appointments. Instead, they will use the NHS app and wearable devices to monitor patients remotely.
NHS bosses claim half of the 135 million hospital outpatient appointments every year are ‘pointless’ and follow-ups and consultations could instead be done in high-street surgeries.
It comes as the government is set to launch a ten-year plan to create a ‘neighbourhood health service’, The Times reports.
‘As we deliver the transformational shifts in our 10-Year Plan, from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention, it will have radical implications for services,’ Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester.
‘Much of what’s done in a hospital today, will be done on the high street, over the phone, or through the app in a decade’s time.’
The plans are set to link family doctors, nurses, social care services and volunteers with money paid to NHS regions based on how effective their care is rather than how busy the hospitals are.
Streeting added: ‘We will use financial incentives to invest more in public health outcomes, not just in more activity that reacts to sickness.’
Earlier this week, figures revealed that the number of patients waiting has fallen to its lowest point in two years – but the number of patients waiting for more than a year for hospital treatment has increased.
The announcement comes after Chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the NHS a cash injection worth an additional £29 billion per year.
Speaking to the Commons, the Chancellor said she is making a ‘record cash investment’ in the NHS, worth an extra 3 per cent a year in real terms.
The Chancellor insisted this would lead to ‘more appointments, more doctors and more scanners’ as Labour seeks to deliver on its manifesto promise to get the NHS ‘back on its feet’.
However, NHS bosses responded to the settlement with a lukewarm response. They said they would need even more money if the Government is to achieve its aim of treating 92 per cent of patients within 18 weeks of a GP referral by the end of this Parliament.
Matthew Taylor, of the NHS Confederation, which represents health organisations, said: ‘Difficult decisions will still need to be made as this additional £29 billion won’t be enough to cover increasing costs of new treatments, with staff pay likely to account for a large proportion of it.
‘On its own, this won’t guarantee that waiting time targets are met.’
Sir Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, told the NHS ConfedExpo conference in Manchester that the health service has done ‘really well relative to other parts of the public service’.
But he added: ‘We all know it’s never enough because of the scale of advancement, all the ambition, the day-to-day cost pressures… but I think everyone’s starting to accept and understand we’ve got what the country can afford to give us.
‘We really need to get better value for that money – it is broadly the equivalent of the GDP of Portugal, so it’s a huge amount.’
Government documents accompanying the Spending Review show that, on average, from 2023/24 to 2028/29, the NHS in England will receive 3 per cent real-terms growth in day-to-day spending, equivalent to a £29 billion increase in annual budgets.
The Government said it will also invest up to £10 billion in NHS technology and digital transformation by 2028/29, plus £6 billion to speed up tests and treatments.
Scanners, ambulances and urgent treatment centres are among things the extra cash – part of the overall £29 billion – will pay for, with the aim of delivering up to 4 million more tests and procedures in the next five years.
NHS England figures show 7.42 million treatments were waiting to be done at the end of March, relating to 6.25 million patients – up from 7.4 million and 6.24 million respectively at the end of February.
This is all utter rubbish – have you tried getting an appointment with your doctor? GPs are already overburdened with patients, can you imagine what it’s going to be like when they set all this up?
To slash NHS waiting lists, they should have treated only patients born in the UK. What an amazing idea that would have been.
The list goes on. We could even reduce the housing issue by providing social housing and housing help only to UK-born individuals.
It’s a fantastic idea, but one that this government would put in the bin alongside all the other good ideas.
You can’t even get to see a GP to tell you what is wrong with you, so what chance is there that they will heal you too?
So the government believe they will fix the enormous waiting lists in hospitals by giving GPs huge waiting lists instead – benefits to patients – zero.
What planet are these tools on? You can’t even see a GP for love or money. Or we get robbed off by either a nurse or told to go and see somebody at the chemist, and to top that, GPs are not specialists and this could end up being very dangerous for patients, and our government know it, but then that’s their plan – watch this space when people starting dropping down dead in their droves.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 