Dr Dan has spent much of the past week communicating the key principles behind the Coalition Government’s healthcare reforms, which will help to improve the delivery of high quality patient care by:
• Ensuring that our NHS always remains a universal and free health service, freely available to everyone.
• Cutting £5 billion worth of unnecessary bureaucracy and waste in the NHS, and ensuring that this money can instead be put into frontline patient care.
• Ensuring that it is healthcare professionals (doctors and nurses), the people who best understand the needs of their patients, who are put in charge of running the NHS
• Supporting greater patient choice and involvement in health care, so that patients are empowered to make informed choices over where, when and how, they are treated by the NHS.
• Taking the first steps towards genuinely integrated health and social care through the establishment of local health and wellbeing boards, which will bring together key organisations (housing, primary care, hospitals and social services care) to improve community health and wellbeing.
Dan believes that there is, and should never be anything controversial about striving to improve the quality of care available to patients and supports the principles of improving NHS patient care which are behind the health and social care bill.