Bringing the UK health system up to European standards

Lib Dems believe in fairness with entitlements to healthcare guaranteed.  We believe access to personal care should be based on need not the ability to pay.  And Lib Dems would make the NHS more accountable to the people it serves.

The NHS is too centralised, with communities having limited say over their local health services, despite endless ‘consultation’ exercises, and individual patients feeling they have little control over the care they receive. The UK has experienced a growth in health inequalities between the wealthiest and poorest members of society.

Our NHS must give people a real say in how their local health services are run, and establish proper local accountability. In delivering high-quality health services, it is incumbent on government to ensure the most efficient use of taxpayers’ money, and eliminate the many cases of waste and poorly utilized equipment.

Liberal Democrats have proposed replacing the Health Secretary with a Secretary of State for Public Health, to prioritise prevention across all government departments, and nvesting in more school nurses to educate children and parents about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

Recent NHS scandals have magnified public concern - such as that in a West Midlands hospital revealed that 400-1200 more people died between 2005 and 2008 than would have been expected. An NHS watchdog report that claimed managers pursued targets set by the Government at the expense of patient care.

The culture of frenzied target setting that has been introduced into the NHS by Gordon Brown’s Government has had a role to play in the horrific events that occurred at Stafford general hospital? But the Government's response to the revelations in the West Midlands have been insufficient. Local campaigners claim that the problems at this hospital have not been addressed despite assurances and spin from the government.

There is a need for the abolition of these targets and a return to focusing on looking after the desperately ill.

The Healthcare Commission and the Care Quality Commission are supposed to the government’s watchdogs but they have been failing. It has yet to be established what lessons can be learnt from what happened in this and other recent NHS scandals.

When doctors at that hospital have confirmed that they were instructed by their managers to abandon seriously ill patients and to treat people with minor ailments instead in order to meet the Prime Minister's targets, it is not enough to talk of reviews, inquiries and to blame other people. The government should scrap the mad targets that make hospitals tick boxes rather than look after the desperately ill.