UK health minister says NHS needs to make ‘three big shifts’ to survive

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The NHS must undergo three “big shifts” in how it delivers care to ensure a sustainable future, Wes Streeting has said.

Speaking at the Financial Times’ Weekend festival in London on Saturday, the UK health and social care secretary said the new government would prioritise moving NHS treatment “from hospital to community”, “analogue to digital” and “sickness to prevention”.

The three shifts “are absolutely necessary, and actually existential . . . for the future of the NHS”, Streeting said. 

“We’ve got to take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS,” he said, noting that collaboration between the health service and life sciences sector was happening but only “in exceptional cases”. 

People were “living longer but . . . not living well for longer”, adding that the NHS needed to modernise and “diagnose earlier and treat faster”.

More emphasis on prevention and primary care would help ease pressure on overstretched hospitals and “push ill health and co-morbidities . . . later into retirement”, he said. 

Analysis published in the Lancet Health Longevity journal this year suggested that, using England as an example, more than 70,000 extra “quality-adjusted life-years” could be generated over roughly 20 years through steps to reduce risk factors for dementia, such as vision loss and high cholesterol.

The NHS in England is grappling with long waiting lists for routine care, exacerbated by the cancellation of about 1.5mn appointments and operations owing to a wave of strike action, and an ageing population.

In secondary care there were 100,658 vacancies as of March, according to the British Medical Association, the main medical union.

Streeting, in an echo of his first official statement as health secretary, said the health service was “broken but not beaten” and argued that “good social care” was necessary to achieve “the recovery we want to see” in the NHS. 

Social care was barely mentioned in the general election campaign, despite the millions of people affected by England’s increasingly threadbare provision for the elderly and the disabled. 

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer inherited plans from the Conservative government to cap the amount individuals contribute towards their own care costs, but England’s largest councils in July warned of a £30bn “black hole” in funding for the proposals. At the end of July, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced it would not be implemented, saving the £1bn it would have cost in 2025-26.

Streeting said that while “action on social care needs to happen now”, longer-term challenges also had to be addressed, including around more complex care needs and an ageing population. 

“Give us time,” he said of calls for the Labour government to move more quickly to implement its policies. 

Streeting said he would work with Peter Kyle, science and technology secretary, to “bulldoze through . . . institutional barriers” in the NHS to make the service “a catalyst for great, groundbreaking science made here in Britain”. 

Asked about the decision by Reeves to cut winter fuel payments for better-off pensioners, Streeting said “we’ve got to get the balance right . . . and invest in our public services without always having to reach for the tax lever”.