PM: NHS improvements a priority
The prime minister wrote an open letter to staff on the sixtieth anniversary of the service's founding
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Tuesday, 01, Jan 2008 08:21
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stressed that improvements to the National Health Service (NHS) are a priority of his government.
In an open letter on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the healthcare provider, Mr Brown praised the efforts of staff in improving the quality of medical care to patients.
Mr Brown said: "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."
He said 79,000 more nurses, 30,000 more hospital doctors and 6,000 more GPs were working for the NHS in the last ten years, adding that waiting times across the board had been sharply reduced as a result.
He said 99.9 per cent of people requiring cancer treatment were seen by specialists within two weeks of being referred by their general practitioner. Speaking about the mortality rates from diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular ailments, Mr Brown said improvements in treatment had resulted in 200,000 lives being saved.
Outlining the goals he hoped the free medical service would work towards, the prime minister said he was hoping for a more personalised service so that patients could achieve treatment when and where they wanted. He added that improved information services should also be prioritised in order to enable people to take better care of their own health.
He added that the proposed changes would form part of a new constitution for the NHS which would set out "the rights and responsibilities associated with an entitlement to NHS care."
The health service was created by the Labour government of Clement Attlee in 1948.