£2.2bn of ‘wasteful' NHS spending to be diverted to working classes
Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), said: 'A patient's postcode and where they live should not determine the level of NHS care they receive, so a review of the funding formula for general practice – which currently does not account for health inequalities – is a good thing, something the college has campaigned for and is long overdue.
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Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Overweight Brits to get awarded shop vouchers for upping step count and eating healthily
The new measures are part of Labour's 10 Year Health Plan set to be unveiled on Thursday WEIGH TO GO Overweight Brits to get awarded shop vouchers for upping step count and eating healthily Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) OVERWEIGHT Brits will get shop vouchers to help shed the pounds. An NHS plan will see users awarded points for upping their step count and eating healthily. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 Wes Streeting said: 'We're bringing together tech, business, the NHS, and citizens to get Britain moving and helping drive down waiting lists' Credit: Getty They can then be traded for vouchers, with discounts at supermarkets and coffee shops. Details are still being finalised but it is expected users will link health data on their smartphones to the NHS app. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: 'We're bringing together tech, business, the NHS, and citizens to get Britain moving and helping drive down waiting lists. 'During a cost-of-living crisis, we're not going to make food more expensive or ban treats — we're not the fun police. 'Our approach is more nudge than nanny.' The new measures are part of Labour's 10 Year Health Plan set to be unveiled on Thursday. Supermarkets will be forced to promote healthy products such as fruit and vegetables instead of chocolate and crisps. Sir Brendan Foster, long-distance Olympian and founder of the Great North Run, will also help in a new campaign to get people exercising. Sir Brendan Foster, long-distance Olympian and founder of the Great North Run, will also help in a new campaign to get people exercising. The Government says reducing daily intake by just 50 calories could lift 340,000 children and two million adults out of obesity. Treating obesity-related conditions costs the NHS £11.4billion a year. Mr Streeting added: 'If we don't tackle the rising tide of costs and demand on the NHS, then we won't have an NHS much longer.'
The Sun
2 hours ago
- The Sun
Overweight Brits to get awarded shop vouchers for upping step count and eating healthily
OVERWEIGHT Brits will get shop vouchers to help shed the pounds. An NHS plan will see users awarded points for upping their step count and eating healthily. 2 They can then be traded for vouchers, with discounts at supermarkets and coffee shops. Details are still being finalised but it is expected users will link health data on their smartphones to the NHS app. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: 'We're bringing together tech, business, the NHS, and citizens to get Britain moving and helping drive down waiting lists. 'During a cost-of-living crisis, we're not going to make food more expensive or ban treats — we're not the fun police. 'Our approach is more nudge than nanny.' The new measures are part of Labour's 10 Year Health Plan set to be unveiled on Thursday. Supermarkets will be forced to promote healthy products such as fruit and vegetables instead of chocolate and crisps. Sir Brendan Foster, long-distance Olympian and founder of the Great North Run, will also help in a new campaign to get people exercising. Sir Brendan Foster, long-distance Olympian and founder of the Great North Run, will also help in a new campaign to get people exercising. The Government says reducing daily intake by just 50 calories could lift 340,000 children and two million adults out of obesity. Treating obesity-related conditions costs the NHS £11.4billion a year. Mr Streeting added: 'If we don't tackle the rising tide of costs and demand on the NHS, then we won't have an NHS much longer.' 2
The Independent
5 hours ago
- The Independent
This 10-year plan may be the last chance to save the NHS
The 10-year plan for the National Health Service that Sir Keir Starmer is expected to publish in the next few days is likely to be a somewhat incoherent document. From the advance publicity, it would seem to have a lot of disconnected ideas in it, some good, some not so good and some irrelevant. The government hopes that weight-loss drugs will offer the hope of a big advance against obesity-related illnesses – but this comes after new figures raised concerns about their safety. If large language models can speed up the development of new pharmaceuticals, so much the better. But we remain sceptical about whether supermarkets ought to be recruited into policing their customers' calorie intakes. What will decide the success or failure of the NHS over the next decade, however, will be the design of the structural reforms to the service. Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, has made a good start in two respects. He has welcomed private-sector providers to help deliver NHS services free at the point of need, and he has taken an axe to the central bureaucracy of NHS England. The test for the 10-year plan will be the extent to which it brings in further changes to incentives throughout the NHS so that it becomes responsive to patients. Sir Jim Mackey, the new chief executive of the NHS, says many of the right things. 'It feels like we've built mechanisms to keep the public away because it's an inconvenience,' he says in his first interview since taking up the post three months ago. He says of the current NHS: 'It takes forever. It costs a fortune. We need to 'de-layer it' because it's expensive, it slows decision-making down, it de-powers people who need to make decisions.' The sentiment is right, but again, some of his ideas seem better than others. We are not convinced that using patient satisfaction surveys to decide how much money NHS trusts receive is going to work. The evidence of reform under the last Labour government was that the mere existence of competition from private-sector providers had a dramatic effect on the performance of NHS units. Already, there are the very early signs that the extra resources put into the NHS are bearing fruit, less than 12 months after the change of government. Luke Tryl, the opinion pollster for More in Common, reported on BBC's Newsnight on Friday that people in focus groups are starting to report positive experiences of the NHS for the first time since the pandemic. 'If there is a bright spot for the government, it's the NHS,' he said. One of the biggest challenges for Sir Jim and Mr Streeting, however, is more political than structural. They have to send the starkest message to doctors: please do not go on strike; take responsibility; show leadership; it is up to you to make the NHS work, because if it cannot be turned round this time, then it probably is the end of this model of healthcare. Sir Jim appears to understand this. He says that his 'big worry' is that if the NHS cannot deliver a service that is better at listening to patients – the particular example he gave was maternity care – 'we'll lose the population; if we lose the population, we've lost the NHS; for me, it's straightforward: the two things are completely dependent on each other.' He is absolutely right. Universal healthcare free at the point of need is a noble idea, but it desperately needs Labour's reforms to work if it is to survive.
