NHS keeps public away and patients are seen as 'inconvenience', health service's new boss says

Daily Mail​

4 hours ago

The NHS has built 'mechanisms to keep the public away' as patients are seen as an 'inconvenience', its new boss has said.
Sir Jim Mackey, who was made chief executive of NHS England on March 31, has publicly criticised the health service for often being 'deaf' to criticism and retaining 'fossilised' methods of working that are outdated.
Ahead of the implementation of a 10-year health plan set to be published by the UK Government next week, Sir Jim told The Daily Telegraph that in recent years, the NHS has often 'made it really hard' for people to receive care.
He added: 'You've got a relative in hospital, so you're ringing a number on a ward that no one ever answers.
'The ward clerk only works nine to five or they're busy doing other stuff; the GP practice scramble every morning.
'It feels like we've built mechanisms to keep the public away because it's an inconvenience.'
Sir Jim also warned that if the growing disconnect between NHS services and the public is not rectified at 'pace', it could result in the loss of the public health service altogether.
He said: 'If we lose the population, we've lost the NHS. For me, it's straightforward. The two things are completely dependent on each other'.
It comes ahead of the Government's 10-year plan for the NHS, set to be unveiled next week.
Aimed at improving services, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is reportedly set to link doctors' and nurses' pay to their success in bringing down waiting lists.
Under the proposed plans, NHS patients could also be contacted several weeks after receiving treatment and asked if it was good enough for the hospital to get paid in full.
If the patient says no, roughly 10 per cent of 'standard payment rates' are set to be diverted to a local 'improvement fund', the Times previously reported.
The major revamp is also set to relocate patient care from hospitals to community-based health centers.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said on Wednesday that the plan will aim to 'address one of the starkest health inequalities', which he claims is the unequal access to information and choice when it comes to healthcare.
For Sir Jim, the health service, first created in 1948, is in urgent need of a 're-orientation', with a shift in mindset from "it's going to be a pain if you turn up because I'm quite busy" to 'how do we find out what you need and get it sorted.'
Having started his career in the NHS in 1990, Sir Jim also revealed that his concerns about the health service are predominantly driven by his own childhood experience, after his father died in a hospital 'known for its poor standards of care'.
Adding that he will carry the trauma of his father's death 'for the rest of my life', the NHS England boss previously vowed to MPs that he would 'pick up the pace of reform' and tackle the widespread 'inefficiency'.
In April, MailOnline revealed how Sir Jim is 'running the NHS from a train carriage' as he was caught watching Netflix in the middle of the afternoon before snoozing off.
Sir Jim, who commutes 1,200 miles a week between the office in London and his Northumberland home, was also found by a Mail exclusive investigation to have left his laptop unlocked while using a train toilet.
He openly displayed documents including one revealing details of an 'NHS leadership' meeting. And the health service chief slept half an hour - through an alert on his device reminding him of an online meeting.
In response, former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: 'You couldn't make it up.
'It's not a great lesson in efficiency when you waste so much time travelling and falling asleep. You can't run the NHS from a train carriage. If you want to do the job properly, you've got to be in the office. It's what most businesses would demand.'
But Health Secretary Wes Streeting backed his hire to lead the NHS, declaring: 'Jim is proving to be worth his weight in gold.'
Sir Jim was initially appointed to oversee a dramatic cut in waste and inefficiency across the NHS, with the Government saying it wants to axe 50 per cent of corporate management jobs and use the savings of hundreds of millions of pounds to improve frontline services.
It comes ahead of the Government's 10-year plan for the NHS, set to be unveiled next week. Aiming at improving services, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is reportedly set to link doctors' and nurses' pay to their success in bringing down waiting lists. (File image of an NHS waiting room)
The transition' period under the Labour government is expected to take two years, with Sir Jim due to be the helmsman until then.
In a bid to take pressure off hospitals and cut down waiting lists, the Government previously announced that 85 new mental health emergency departments will be built across England.
The 85 units will be funded by £120million secured in the Spending Review, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they will be staffed by specialist nurses and doctors.
Maternity wards are also expected to be among the first parts of UK hospitals to be placed under the microscope, after Streeting launched a full review into services across the country, saying that women had been 'ignored, gaslit [and] lied to' by the NHS.
Previous plans unveiled by Mr Streeting revealed a diversion of more than £2billion in NHS spending to working class communities.