MPs and peers debate the future of the NHS: new Nuffield Trust and King’s Fund report

As England’s health and social care system implements wide-ranging reforms at a time of austerity and rising pressure on services, eight leading parliamentarians have expressed their hopes and fears for the future in a publication jointly published by The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust.

The MPs and peers, who include Health Select Committee chair, Rt Hon Stephen Dorrell MP, Labour deputy Lords leader Lord Philip Hunt and former minister, Rt Hon Paul Burstow MP, express their views frankly but all agree that politicians have a crucial role to play in helping and enabling the NHS to overcome the unprecedented challenges ahead.

Politicians of all parties owe it to the public to have an honest dialogue here, rather than trying to exploit confrontations for short-term political gainRt Hon Stephen Dorrell, Health Select Committee chair and report contributor

The publication follows a series of three events between parliamentarians and health leaders arranged by The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust, and at the initiation of Baroness Williams who has written a foreword for the publication.

The events aimed to focus political debate on longer-term challenges and issues following the divisive debates that marked the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill.

There is a strong emphasis on the need for politicians to step up and play their part in a long-term process of reconfiguration and moving care out of hospitals. The Rt Hon Stephen Dorrell MP wrote that: “Politicians of all parties owe it to the public to have an honest dialogue here, rather than trying to exploit confrontations for short-term political gain.”

Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh stands up for MPs who are reluctant to place themselves in the firing line of public opinion on hospital closures, arguing that resistance to reconfiguration stems from the failure of decision-makers to take legitimate concerns into account.

He writes that until the health service “is prepared to listen to the voice and expectations of the public, plans hatched will tend to be scotched by public opinion. There won’t be the political will to see them through. And, arguably, there shouldn’t be.”

Many parliamentarians argued that primary care could do far more to help the NHS improve efficiency and quality of life for patients, and that more should be asked from the sector.

Labour’s former Shadow Secretary of State for Health, John Healey, warns: “primary care services must be as ready for exacting challenge as the rest of the NHS. They have been largely cosseted from the changes driven by the Government’s wholesale NHS reorganisation, yet variation in standards remains wider, and public accountability weaker, than in any other part of the NHS.”

The most radical proposals come from practicing GP and Conservative MP, Dr Phillip Lee, who calls for a wholesale rethink of the principles underlying the NHS in order to safeguard quality care for all.

He writes: “I believe that the current infrastructure, and the widespread and relatively unchallenged acceptance of a service funded solely by the taxpayer, will lead to poorer patient outcomes than we should be achieving. We have no choice but to fundamentally change the way this country’s health care is funded and delivered in the 21st century”.