Take the politics out of healthcare
I believe the NHS will be a stronger and more stable organisation if removed from the political arena. I would like to see the NHS managed independently of government but accountable to the people by reporting to a cross-party committee. The NHS should be free to operate without constant interference from whoever the minister is, or the government ideology of the day. A clear mandate should be devised that sets out what we expect the NHS to provide. I also believe that for generations the public have become disconnected with the day-to-day costs of their healthcare. This should be reinstated by including a full and transparent breakdown of costs whenever we receive care, either from a GP or hospital. We, the public, need to learn to stop taking the NHS for granted.
Graham Taylor
Don’t privatise the NHS
Stop now with the reforms that even the coalition admitted were a mistake. Reverse the privatisation of our NHS and stop private finance initiatives, which are crippling it. International comparisons have shown the NHS to be one of the fairest, most efficient healthcare systems in the world. What you have done is bad for patients. If you don’t stop, you will have us nurses to answer to.
Karen Chilver, community palliative care nurse specialist
Please keep the NHS in the hands of the state, please do not sell pieces off to private companies. Ask the people of Britain to pay a little more tax, promise them that this tax will be used just for the NHS. Give us more money so that we can provide quality care rather than a cheap alternative. Quality costs money. Please give us the resources to improve the quality of care our patients receive. Oh and just one other request, a pay increase more than once every five years would be much appreciated.
Sarah O’Hare
Listen to those of us who work on the frontline
The promises you made about seven-day GP opening are ill thought out and come at a time where services are already stretched. Please listen to us at the frontline: patients deserve a better service, but trying to stretch an already-close-to-breaking-point service to cover more hours makes no sense. It adds fuel to the fire that your party has an ideological goal to underfund and then privatise the NHS.
Patients are the most important thing in the NHS. But to ask the public to drive change and lead the NHS is short-sighted. The healthcare professionals at the frontline are the experts in how things work and most will tell you that we need to focus on what patients need, rather than what they want. Everyone wants a GP appointment at a moment’s notice but it’s simply not feasible. By trying to pander to this “now now now” mentality you are destabilising core services and ruining morale. Let us at the frontline decide what is needed (we are all patients as well) and then back us up.
Aseem Rahman
I believe the way to resolve our NHS crisis is multi-factorial, however I believe the answers reside in the heads of the frontline staff within both hospital and community staff. It is no good making changes or reorganisation from within boardrooms or parliamentary offices as you do not deal with the daily stresses and strains put on staff, the service and the hard work that goes into providing good patient care. Most of us would really like to be providing excellent patient care and most of the time we do, despite the financial and staffing constraints.
Katherine Abbott
Prioritise mental health care
Please increase the funding to help those with mental health problems, especially those in primary care or in secondary (care) but in the community. So much mental illness leads to physical illness. A lot of work needs to be done on the prevention and causes of depression. No health without mental health.
Mike Osborne
Get the staff on side and support them
If you want a health service that delivers the best for its patients you need to have the staff on your side. Each amazing member of NHS staff wants to provide the best possible service for patients but they are prevented from doing so by a number of factors. We need less paperwork, fewer audits, and fewer paper trails, most of which seem to exist solely to justify a job or appeal to the latest political whim. This would free up time to care.
We need to feel supported: massive top-down re-organisations, threats to wages and to terms and conditions of employment do not make us work harder. Adding extra stress to what is already a stressful job has a negative effect on productivity. Working crazy shifts and giving up time with our families at weekends and Christmas is made slightly more bearable by our unsocial hours payments and we feel valued. Forcing trusts to down-band staff and taking away unsocial hours payments has the opposite effect.
Owen Winsland
Looking at general practice, my own corner of the healthcare system (the part that delivers 90% of NHS activity with only 8% of the NHS budget) I want: a government that values and takes care of its frontline workforce; that tells everyone how good they are and doesn’t forever tell them how bad or inadequate they are. We need policies that don’t perversely incentivise or bully staff. And a restoration of trust and goodwill in return for a cull of bureaucracy and an end to hyper-regulation ... It’s a simple equation: respected and supported staff deliver dignified, quality care to patients.
I want patients to get the general practice care they need. I want them to have time with their doctors and I want their doctors to be unburdened from bureaucracy to be able to look after their patients properly. I want doctors to have proper access to diagnostic and community services so that those who really need them get the care they need.
ID7091021
NHS staff at present are not being cared for enough, not being treated fairly, continue to be overstretched and feel let down and lied to by seniors above them. If you want the best healthcare system in the world you need the best staff. To get and retain these staff they firstly need the resources, respect and appropriate pay reflection. Increased productivity equals long-term better care for the public.
Sam Garman
Invest in more staff
Wards are too short of nurses, with those recently qualified too anxious about losing their pin to stay long because they can see we’re too stretched, and at times it’s dangerous.
Fay Howard
Protect whistleblowers
Tell us what you intend to do further for whistleblowers. When will you give staff the resources to do their jobs safely? In June last year a group of us sat in your office; we discussed the plight of whistleblowers, the devastation of what telling the truth and raising concerns does to a person’s career. You gave us a review and did half a job. You also said there wasn’t enough time to consider a public inquiry. There is now. Whistleblowers are still being persecuted. They write to you and you offer no real practical solutions. It’s time for the real truth to be aired publicly, including the truth around those gagged during the review last year.
Fiona Bell
Prioritise health and social care integration
I realise this needs to be staged over years, not months, but please take steps to ensure that budgets are merged so that patients are no longer stuck in acute beds awaiting social care funding; that care homes with contract beds can afford to pay staff the living wage; and that domiciliary care is properly funded to enable people to receive the best of care at home.
Gareth Tuckwell
You can read other letters from healthcare workers on GuardianWitness
