The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7355 p781
25 June 2005

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NHS faces three challenges

The NHS faces three big challenges: putting patients first, reforming its organisation and engaging all its staff, Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health, said at the NHS Confederation conference in Birmingham last week.

The NHS can put patients first by implementing elements of the IT programme such as “choose and book” and electronic patient records, by further integrating health and social care and by paying by results, she said.

The NHS should not treat system reform as a series of separate projects with a box to be ticked, but instead transform each organisation and the whole service of which it is part, Ms Hewitt said.

Involving staff is crucial to reform, she said, since patients and users will only feel truly valued and cared for if its staff do. “I don’t believe that there needs to be any conflict between the interests of patients and the interests of our staff,” she added. “And there shouldn’t be, provided that the patient, not the institution, is at the centre of all we do.”