Keir Starmer has outlined a 10-year plan for the NHS based on a shift from hospitals to community health hubs, a renewed focus on prevention and an embrace of technology, which was billed as perhaps the last chance to save the health service in its current form.
Speaking at a health centre in Stratford, east London, alongside Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor – who had not been expected to appear – Starmer insisted this would be different to the long list of previous NHS revamps that achieved little.
“We’re putting in the resources, we’re putting in the priorities and we’ve got the resolve to see this through,” he said. “In the end, I genuinely think it is only Labour governments that can do this.
“I want in 10, 20, 30 years for people to look back and say this was the government that seized the moment and reformed the NHS so it’s fit for the future.”
Setting out the broad details of the plan, a 165-page document published as Starmer spoke, the prime minister said the service in England would be shifted “from being only a sickness service to a health service which is genuinely preventative – prevents diseases in the first place”.
This would involve, he said, more of a focus on areas such as screening and early diagnosis, and on vaccinations and lifestyle-based measures such as pharmacy-based weight-loss services and measures to make supermarket foods healthier.
Another pillar, he said, would be to move away from a “hospital-dominated service” to one more based around community health centres like the one he spoke in, saying this was needed to reflect the gradual societal shift away from acute health crises to more chronic, longer-term conditions.
“We will always need hospitals,” he said. “They will always be important for acute services in particular. But disease has changed, and we must change with it.”
The final focus, he said, would be on “a truly digital health service”, based on high-tech diagnostic and treatment options, but also a gradually expanded NHS app, which Starmer said would be “like having a doctor in your pocket, providing you with 24-hour advice, seven days a week; an NHS that really is always there when you need it”.
Speaking before Starmer, Streeting said urgent change was needed in part to see off voices calling for the current model of the NHS to the abandoned, a seemingly allusion to Reform UK, which has talked previously of a more insurance-based version.
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“There have always been those who whispered that the NHS is a burden, too expensive, inferior to the market, and today those voices grow louder, exploiting the crisis in our NHS in order to dismantle it,” he said.
“We also know the consequences of failure. That’s why we can’t afford to fail. To succeed, we need to defeat the cynicism that says that nothing ever changes.”
Reeves, making her first public appearance since she was seen in tears at prime minister’s questions in the Commons, which sparked questions about her future, spoke only briefly, saying that the government’s fiscal discipline had allowed it to give more resources to the NHS.