NHS Reform

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am really grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. NHS managers have one of the most difficult challenges in the country. Not only do they have to balance revenue and expenditure; they have patients’ lives at risk and public accountability. It is really difficult to run a hospital or a clinical commissioning group. These are some of the most difficult jobs one can imagine. We need to support them. I hope they will agree and welcome a move away from targets as the main way of driving change in the NHS to intelligent transparency and peer review. This is not a confrontation with doctors. Doctors overwhelmingly support a seven-day service. It is, I am afraid, a battle with the BMA, with which we have been trying to negotiate on the matter for nearly three years. It has refused to move. It needs to get in touch with what its members want and what the public want, and then I hope we can make much faster progress.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

A characteristic of the health system in our country is that we have something like 20% to 25% fewer doctors per head of population than comparable countries such as France, Germany and Spain. Is it part of the Secretary of State’s vision to correct this over time, and will that make reforms such as these easier to push through?

[Mr Hunt]

We do need more doctors and more nurses. We saw an increase of about 8,000 nurses and 10,000 doctors in the previous Parliament. We will need more for the simple reason that we will have 1 million more over-70s by the end of this Parliament. That said, the NHS is admired in the other countries my hon. Friend talks about for our models of care, which are sometimes less hospital-centric and therefore inherently more efficient than what happens in some other systems. The learning should go both ways.