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PM's New Year message to NHS staff

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP

2008 marks the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the NHS.  At the start of this sixtieth anniversary year, I want to pay tribute to you - the staff of the NHS.

Over the past 10 years we have invested in health services at record levels. There are now 79,000 more nurses, 30,000 more hospital doctors, 6,000 more GPs. Where we have seen opportunities to improve the management of health resources we have sought to carry out the reforms which have made this possible - from new roles for nurses and GPs through to new foundation hospitals with greater freedoms and improved stewardship of the NHS’s resources.

And in 2008 the NHS is as relevant as it was in 1948. For sixty years now Britain has shown the way to health care not as a privilege to be paid for but as a fundamental human right.   The NHS remains our priority not just because it has been fundamental to our past, but because a renewed NHS will be even more important to our future and that of our children.

You have responded with improved care and a higher standard of service. Over the past ten years waiting times have been sharply reduced.  99.9% of people with suspected cancer are now seen by a specialist within two weeks of being referred by their GP, which is up from 63% in 1997.  Over 99% of people with suspected cancer receive their first treatment within a maximum of 31 days of diagnosis. Cancer mortality rates have fallen over the last 10 years, and an estimated 60,000 lives have been saved.  Similarly, death rates from cardiovascular disease in people aged under 75 years are down in the last 10 years, saving 175,000 lives.

These are your achievements and I want to thank you for them.

Whenever I have visited hospitals, GP surgeries, and health centres across the country people tell me of their huge admiration for our doctors, our nurses and those who work in our health service. The best of NHS care has always depended on its staff for innovation, for commitment and for professionalism and we will continue to draw on your ideas and look for ways to empower you.

In 2008 we know that working together there is more to do. The Government’s priorities for the coming year will be to do all we can to support you as you work to bear down on hospital infections and improve access to care.  We have committed additional investment to MRSA screening and deep cleaning of our wards in order to help you.  Achievement of the 18 weeks target by the end of the year will mean the shortest waiting times since the NHS was established - almost unthinkable just a few years ago.

But 2008 should be more than this as well. I intend for this also to be the year in which we demonstrate beyond a doubt that the NHS is as vital for our next 60 years as it was for our last - more relevant to our future and the challenges that we face than ever before. That is why one of my first acts as Prime Minister was to ask the eminent surgeon, Professor Ara Darzi, to conduct a fundamental review of the NHS, listening to patients, to staff and to the public and understanding their expectations from a 21st century healthcare service.

So over the course of the next year the Department of Health, under Alan Johnson’s leadership, will be setting out how the NHS needs to continue to reform to meet the new challenges of 21st century healthcare and 21st century lives. Reform and change which we will work with you to achieve to create a better NHS.

We will describe how we will achieve our shared ambition of an NHS which is more personal and responsive to individual needs. Personalised not just because patients can get the treatment that they need when and where they want, but because from an early stage we are all given the information and advice to take greater responsibility for our own health.

We will talk to you about the changes we need to make together to create an NHS which is as good at prevention and keeping us healthy as it is at the care and the cures we know are there when we need them. An NHS which is able to offer the help and support that we all need to make healthy choices for ourselves and our families.

We will set out how we can give all those patients who want it, or would benefit from it, far greater control and choice over their own health and their own healthcare. We need an NHS that gives all of those with long-term or chronic conditions the choice of greater support, information and advice, allowing them to play a far more active role in managing their own condition in partnership with their clinicians. And even when healthy, we know all of us will benefit from earlier information about potential health risks and advice on how we can keep ourselves fit and well.

And we will also examine how all these changes can be enshrined in a new constitution of the NHS setting out for the first time the rights and responsibilities associated with an entitlement to NHS care.

I believe these are steps vital to securing the health of the NHS for the next sixty years. They will require a broadening and a deepening of reform to ensure that the NHS as a whole attaches the same priority to a personal and preventative service as many of you already reflect in your own day-to-day decisions. And I believe they will transform the experience of the NHS for millions of people in this country.

Working together I know we can make these changes a reality. I thank you for your continued hard-work, determination and innovation and I look forward to working with you all to make 2008 not just a milestone for the NHS’s past but for its future as well.