Explainer-in-brief: A look into a Health Week overshadowed by political chaos
You might have not noticed amidst all the chaos, but this is “health week”. Yesterday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid pledged to implement cultural change within the NHS.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting pointed out that currently NHS managers can’t even do their job with patients’ care because they’re too busy managing collapsing hospitals and trying to keep an overstretched workforce together. NHS staff are “lions led by donkeys”, Streeting said.
Interestingly, a culture change is precisely what Jeremy Hunt, one of Javid’s predecessors, has been calling for. Hunt claims that the only way to achieve patient safety, cutting avoidable deaths, is to reform the culture of cover-ups and the obsession with reaching top-down targets.
Did Javid take inspiration? A divided party where MPs don’t talk to each other is hardly the best place to start to reform the NHS. Maybe it’s time Javid and Hunt have a chat.