Health
Health: our vision
The NHS is a great national institution which embodies the values of a society in which we care about each other, not just about ourselves. Our priority is to transform the NHS into one of the great health systems of the world: true to its values, but fit for the future. To ensure that real-term increases in NHS spending deliver world-class outcomes, we will carefully reform the NHS.
We will end the use of unnecessary and costly management bureaucracy to control the NHS from above. It undermines the dedicated work of doctors and nurses, and cuts patients out of decisions about their own care. Instead, doctors, nurses and patients must be put back in the driving seat.
We will empower local clinical commissioning groups to come together to take direct control of NHS funds to commission the services patients want. This will end the need for less accountable tiers of management including strategic health authorities and primary care trusts.
We want to give patients a free choice over the care they receive, empowered by a revolution in easily accessible, quality information about the results that different GPs, hospitals and other healthcare providers achieve for people. And these providers will in turn be paid by results: rewarded for achieving good outcomes for patients.
The whole system will also be strengthened by a bigger role for local communities. Councils will manage protected public health budgets and will be paid by results for encouraging healthier living so that we reduce long term cost pressures on the NHS. Social care will be truly integrated with local health services. And there will be real financial incentives to tackle health inequalities.
Our reforms will help to create a world-class NHS that saves thousands more lives every year by freeing up resources to go to the front line, giving professionals power and patients choice, and maintaining the principle that healthcare should be delivered to patients on the basis of need, not their ability to pay.