NHS

The NHS is a great British institution.  All of us will rely on it at some point in our lives.  The independent Commonwealth Fund recently looked at health services around the world and considered that what we have in the UK is the best in the world.  The many hard working nurses and doctors who contribute to this success have a lot of be proud of.  Locally we have great work done at St Michael's Hospital, which is a national leader in breast surgery, and Camborne and Redruth Hospital which has a number of specialisms including stroke and prosthetics.  

Some also like to play politics with our NHS, which I think is wrong.  A few years ago the local Labour Party claimed that St Michael's Hospital in Hayle would have to close.  The story was completely made up but it caused anxiety among staff at the time and we needed to do a lot of work to reassure people that it was only a political story.  

 We have to have honesty about the funding that is going into the NHS, and the reasons that there are still challenges.  I have always been clear that the NHS should be free at the point of need and it is.  In 2010 when Gordon Brown left office, spending on the NHS was £97 billion per year.  It will have gone up by over 25 percent to £123 billion by 2019/2020.  So funding has not been cut, it has increased substantially. 

However, the NHS has also seen a huge increase in demand for its services.  As medical science advances and we live longer, the number of operations and the cost of medication has increased.  While we have over 12,000 more doctors and nurses than we had in 2010, they are being asked to do more. Since 2010, we are seeing 2.4 million more A&E attendances and 5.9 million more diagnostic tests every year. In 2016, the NHS in England performed an average of 4,400 more operations every day compared to 2010.  That is why many sense that there are pressures and why we need to do all we can to make things work more smoothly.

Part of the solution is to get a better join up of services and better linkage between what we do on adult social care through Cornwall Council and what care the NHS provides. If we could get social care in the community working better, we would reduce the number of admissions and return people to their homes more quickly to ease the pressure.

There are no easy answers but a lot of work is being done by local NHS managers to improve the way services work. For its part, government will continue to increase funding and support local staff.