Yahoo News The NHS is terminally ill – cracking down on sunscreen and cough syrup won't cure it
Never mind that sunscreen and gluten free foods have been considered prescription-worthy on the NHS up until now – this is a fairly benign embarrassment as far as public service blunders go.
The £100 million that could be saved per year by cutting back on 10 products currently prescribed on the NHS – including ointments, Omega 3 fish oil, and painkillers – is chump change in the grand scheme of the £15 billion spent on medicine overall. Nevertheless, it is right for NHS England to review its prescription services and find savings, even comparatively small ones, wherever they can.
In a time of constant crisis for the health service – with junior doctors and NHS bosses alike are calling for more funds to sustain the service, including a possible ‘NHS tax’ – the bankrollers (i.e. you and me) need to see that efficiency gains are at least being attempted before the bill goes up. Credit where credit is due: the NHS clinical commissioners are at least trying to practice some level of prudency.
But let’s treat this story as what it really is: a minor virus, adding slightly to the woes of a terminally ill system. No one seriously believes that a crackdown on Lidocaine plasters is the breakthrough reform that is going to save the NHS. Yet the master plan laid out by the Head of the NHS Simon Stevens in today’s Daily Mail is trying to sell the public on that exact fantasy.
Stevens ‘Blueprint to save the NHS’ is headlined with ground-breaking reforms such as…a crackdown on indigestion pills, and getting European visitors to pay their "fair share" for treatment. This would be an excellent start to a satire blueprint, meant to illustrate how far politicians and health professionals have buried their heads in the sand on the severe shortcomings of the NHS. But no, no satire – these are the ‘new waves of reform’ British patients should consider themselves lucky to benefit from.
The most generous reading of this utterly feeble blueprint is that these reforms are teasers, building up to the real change to come. The full blueprint, according to the Mail, is “to be formally announced by Mr Stevens later this week to save the Health Service up to £1billion in two years”. But there has been no indication, from Stevens or others, that we should expect anything outside of the ordinary: more tweaks, more shuffling, more rationing.
Universal access to healthcare – the defining principle of Britain’s National Health Service isn’t much to boast about anymore. Almost every single developed country (with the United States being the obvious outlier) offers 100% coverage to citizens, regardless of their ability to pay. But no country outside the shores of the UK has adopted an NHS-style system to deliver that coverage – in large part because its procedures and outcomes aren’t very good. Patient outcomes are the real test of a system now, and on those grounds, Britain ranks in the bottom third internationally, with data comparable to the Czech Republic and Slovenia, and left in the dust by the likes of Belgium or Switzerland.
Until the politicians and health experts are willing to have an honest conversation about the reforms needed to make the NHS sustainable, talk of how many thousands of lives could be saved each year if UK patients were treated elsewhere will remain limited in the public sphere. But my goodness, will continue to get our fill of stories about crackdowns on cough syrup and sunscreen. They are filler stories, meant to distract from the cold reality that the ‘envy of the world’ is an envy no more.
Kate Andrews is news editor at the Institute of Economic Affairs
