Eltham Labour Party

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The truth about our National Health Service

The NHS is often criticised by the media as inefficient and in "Crisis".  But a staggering 70% of us from recent polls found that their personal health care experiences under the NHS were positive, but found 64% were bombarded by negative press and coverage by the media.  It becomes easy to see that the negative press the NHS receives can be often vastly unprecedented.

The NHS report helps give an impressive view into how the government under Labour is helping benefit our health system for the better.  Since the NHS was first established over half a century ago it has been changing and improving to deal with all medical advances and needs in the 21st Century.  And since the Labour party were elected in 1997 we have trebled the Health budget from £33 billion to £92.5 billion, we are building 156 new hospitals, and we now have 85,000 more nurses and 32,000 doctors since 1997.

Waiting lists have often been targeted by the media, but on the contrary to the media reports waiting lists have been improving by going down by a huge 400,000 patients, while the number of operations have gone up by 700,000.  Waiting times for operations once were over 18 months, but this waiting time has been shrunk to under 6 months in almost all cases, with an average wait at just 7 weeks.

From Media coverage yet again and our opposition parties you may have come to believe that last year the NHS began mass redundancies, but this is far from the truth.  The NHS employs 1.3 million staff, the biggest employer in the UK and now we have 300,000 more staff since 1997.  In our London area alone we now have:

• Over 16,800 more nurses
• 2,527 more consultants
• 688 more GP's
• 984 more dentists
• And only 3% of NHS staff are in management roles, of which cost are very small now.

The redundancies which the media and opposition hyped up were 903 of our 1.3 million staff, and of which 95% were managers and administrators.  All pay for Nurses and doctors are increasing and have all increased by at least 25% since 1997.

The new Health care system, is now not just about treating the sick but helping us all to live healthy lives, and in 2004 we set out six priorities:

1. Tackling health inequalities
2. Reducing the number of people who smoke
3. Tackling obesity
4. Improving sexual health
5. Improving mental health
6. Encouraging sensible drinking

Labour has done it up most for the nations health and can see benefiting from nationwide laws on smoking ban's from public places, the legal smoking age is increasing to 18 and longer pub hours encouraging more sensible drinking.  All helping benefit the public and encouraging people to live healthier lives.

Obesity has become a big problem and can reduce life expectancy of people affected by 10 years, the government have taken action starting in the schools, improving healthier standards to school meals, food labelling has become much clearer now and two million 4-6 year olds now receive free fruit and veg to encourage healthy eating.

The NHS is also dedicated to preventing any illnesses early on to help preventing illness and detecting serious diseases early.

• Extending breast cancer screening to women aged 65-70 years old. 12,000 breast cancers were detected using these screenings in 2004/5 up 40% since 2001
• 15.2 million flu jabs have been made available, for over 65's and people at high risk of catching the flu due to illnesses.
• We are also implementing a National Chlamydia Screening programme for 16 - 24 year olds nationwide, with 260 pharmacies across London giving free over the counter test kits. Of which our local Eltham High Street Boots store is a part of.

I hope you have found some of the findings in the NHS report reassuring of the benefits nationally.  And that often the media hype and opposition is taking issues far out of context, but reassuringly the Labour government has the needs and health of the public in mind and continues to strive for better health services than ever seen before in the NHS.

Further information can be found here at the Your NHS: Better with Labour website

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