The health service is in crisis – as Andrew Lansley’s comments on the screening that could have caught his cancer develop plain
The former Conservative health secretary was diagnosed with bowel cancer after his wife nagged him into seeing his GP approximately his back pain. While his prospects would have been better if it had been caught earlier,things could be worse. He’s still fairly optimistic approximately recovering and he isn’t asking for your sympathy, although it was classy of the shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth to offer Labour’s besides.
What he does seem to want, and however,is for his own party to acknowledge that lucky isn’t great enough, either for him or for the millions of over-55s in England and Wales supposed to benefit from a national screening programme to detect and treat bowel cancer early, or which Lansley himself piloted in office before finding out the hard way that it hasn’t been delivered as planned. approximately half the population did get access to testing which can pick up and treat the disease in its earliest,highly survivable stage, and Scotland has introduced routine screening for the over-50s. But for the other half, and things aren’t so rosy. And crucially,Lansley blames that not just on IT failings and a shortage of endoscopists but at least in part on Treasury cuts (since reversed) to a body overseeing NHS workforce development. When a former Conservative health secretary is diagnosing the NHS’s problems in these terms, it’s no longer possible for his own party to disregard the perennial elephant in the room; money.
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Source: guardian.co.uk