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Wes Streeting, UK health secretary, will on Monday launch a “national conversation” about the future of the National Health Service, which he said was in “an awful state”.
Streeting has called on clinicians, experts and the general public to submit ideas for a new “10-year Health Plan” to rebuild the service to be “fit for the future”. They will be asked to give their suggestions via an online platform called change.NHS.uk which will go live at the start of next year.
The announcement comes as the health department is set for a real-terms funding increase from the Treasury in the Budget and spending review on October 30 — equivalent to a cash injection of billions.
The NHS is expected to get a more generous allocation while many other departments have complained about the tight spending round, including local government, justice and transport.
Yet while health officials said the “mood music” from the government was “positive” in terms of an expected increase in the NHS budget, they were watching closely to see if the chancellor raises National Insurance payments made by employers.
“As the largest employer in the country the NHS would have an extra cost to meet,” one health official said. “The government will increase the revenue budget further for 2025-26, but then in effect take from one hand and give back with the other.”
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Streeting claimed the public engagement exercise would help shape the 10-year plan, which will be published in the spring of next year. He said his three big priorities were better primary care in people’s communities, a shift “from analogue to digital” and a shift from treating disease to preventing it in the first place.
The health secretary said the first priority would be tackled by delivering new neighbourhood health centres that would be closer to people’s homes — where they could see GPs, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists or health visitors in one place.
The shift to digital means bringing together a single patient record through the NHS app with systems able to share that data more easily, he said.
And government efforts to improve disease prevention include giving patients “smart watches and other wearable tech” for them to monitor conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure from their own homes.
Streeting will launch the new online platform at a health centre in east London alongside the chief executive of the London Ambulance Service.
The health secretary told Sky News on Sunday that he had settled the health budget with chancellor Rachel Reeves. “I’ve settled with the chancellor, but we’re not going to fix 14 years (of Tory government) in one Budget,” he said.
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Reeves told a cabinet meeting last Tuesday that she hoped to find extra money for the health service, which one ally dubbed her “number one priority.”
But Streeting said that the NHS would need “fundamental reform” as well as extra financial investment: “It really is in an awful state at the moment,” he said.
An official review of the health service by Lord Ara Darzi found in September that it was in a “critical condition” after years of underfunding.
The report attributed the dire state of the health system in large part to the austerity policies of the 2010s, which slashed public spending in a bid to cut the budget deficit.
It found England spent almost £37bn less than peer countries on its health assets and infrastructure since the 2010s.