The new UK health secretary Wes Streeting has announced an ‘independent investigation’ into the ‘state of the NHS’ to be led by Professor Lord Ara Darzi.
The findings of this ‘rapid’ investigation, which will be published in September, will feed into a new 10-year plan ‘to radically reform’ the NHS, for which patients and staff will be consulted ‘soon’.
Writing for The Sun, Mr Streeting repeated his claim that the NHS is ‘broken’ and said an investigation is needed to ‘diagnose the problem’.
Lord Darzi, a former Labour minister who Mr Streeting described as a ‘one of the NHS’s leading experts’, has been asked to produce a ‘raw and honest assessment’ of the state of the NHS.
The health secretary said the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have been ‘instructed’ to share ‘whatever information’ Lord Darzi needs.
Mr Streeting also argued that ‘sticking-plasters’ will not fix the NHS, and rather ‘fundamental reform’ is required.
The 10-year plan will be led by Sally Warren, who will be leaving her position as policy director at the leading health think tank The King’s Fund, to join DHSC.
During his time as health minister, Lord Darzi led an influential national review of the NHS entitled ‘High Quality Care for All‘, which aimed to improve accountability in clinical practice.
He also worked on Labour’s GP ‘polyclinic’ model – known as Darzi centres – which was later scrapped by the Coalition Government in 2011.
One of Labour’s manifesto promises was to trial ‘neighbourhood health centres’, which seem to resemble the Darzi model, with the aim of improving out-of-hospital care.
Lord Darzi, a surgeon who holds the Paul Hamlyn chair of surgery at Imperial College London, has also previously argued that the GP partnership model is out of date and that GP services should be brought ‘into the fold’ to ‘finally complete the NHS’.
In a statement, Mr Streeting promised that the Government ‘will be honest about the challenges facing the health service’.
He continued: ‘This investigation will uncover hard truths and I’ve asked for nothing to be held back. I trust Lord Darzi will leave no stone unturned and have told him to speak truth to power.
‘I want a raw and frank assessment of the state of the NHS. This is the necessary first step on the road to recovery for our National Health Service, so it can be there for us when we need it, once again.’
Lord Darzi said that the ‘first step’ to tackling any health problem is to establish a ‘proper diagnosis’, and that this investigation will help to reinstate ‘quality of care as the organising principle of the NHS’.
‘My work will analyse the evidence to understand where we are today – and how we got to here – so that the health service can move forward,’ he added.
RCEM welcomes Government action
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has pledged its support to the new Government’s aim of ‘fixing’ the NHS but have warned that ‘efforts must be targeted to where they are most needed‘.
Calling the independent report ‘a step forward for transparency‘, Dr Ian Higginson, vice president of RCEM, said: ‘The health secretary was right, the NHS is broken, and the effects are seen nowhere more starkly than in emergency departments. RCEM has been clearly articulating the real picture for years, and it is refreshing to see a pragmatic and honest assessment of where we are and the scale of the challenge.
He added: ‘To make a significant improvement bed capacity needs to increase, and the beds that we do have need to be used more effectively. People need to be able to leave hospital as soon as they are well enough and there needs to be appropriate social care support there for them when they do.
‘There can be no quick fix in undoing what has been years in the making, but we remain committed to working with the new Government to resuscitate emergency care and restore public confidence in the NHS.‘
The new health secretary has also met with the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee to reopen talks in a bid to bring an end to strike action.
A version of this article was originally published by our sister publication Pulse.
