The Liberal Democrats have announced plans to sell £250m of redundant NHS assets to fund the creation of a paperless health service in England.
The party announced on Thursday that it would use the money to finance new technologies to enable people to book appointments with doctors and get repeat prescriptions online, as well as making doctors contactable on Skype and giving nurses and other NHS workers tablet computers.
The money raised from selling unused NHS land and buildings in England, which Lib Dems think they could collect in the first year after the election, would go into a one-off transformation fund for the changes that NHS boss Simon Stevens said the health service needed in the next parliament.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said the NHS did not need “warm words”, but “hard cash”. He said his party was the only one to have committed to spending the £8bn-a-year that the Stevens requested for the health service in his Five Year Forward View report, published in October 2014.
“We also need to help the NHS adapt so it is fit for the challenges of the 21st century,” said Clegg. “That’s why we have a plan to introduce modern technology that will help patients, with more doctors’ appointments and repeat prescriptions at the touch of a button. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron have ignored the experts on this. Only the Liberal Democrats have listened.”
The £250m figure is based on what the coalition has managed to raise from selling NHS assets so far. A Lib Dem spokespersonsaid the aim would be to raise £250m to digitise the NHS every year of the next parliament, but the immediate goal was only to do it in the first year.
The government owns more than £330bn of land and property, of which the NHS is one of the largest landowners. The coalition announced a strategic land review in 2014 to find at least £5bn of land and property disposals between 2015 and 2020. The £250m fund announced by the Liberal Democrats would be in addition to this target.
Conservative plans to make appointments with GPs available to all patients in England seven-days per week from 8am to 8pm by 2020 will partly be managed with an increase in appointments held over the telephone and Skype. In April 2014, David Cameron said that one in 10 surgeries would start to offer patients the choice of seeing a GP at evenings and weekends, booking appointments online, receiving electronic prescriptions and having checkups over Skype.
