This is the key message from Conservatives' new policy paper on the NHS. It calls for:
- Democratically-elected local councils to be consulted before any attempts to downgrade or close local NHS services, and ensure that councils are asked about their views on the future priorities of the local NHS.
- Ruling out any more pointless reorganisations of NHS services.
- Linking GPs' salaries to the success of the treatments they deliver, whilst scrapping the targets imposed by politicians in Whitehall which distort doctors' clinical decisions.
- Giving doctors and nurses a far bigger say in how budgets are spent.
- Local people to be directly involved in helping run local NHS services, by allowing them to become members of the NHS Trusts which provide local NHS services.
- Giving patients much greater choice over the care they receive, and providing new league tables showing which hospitals and surgeries perform the best, and more information on the prevalence of hospital superbugs.
- Creating a new, national watchdog consumer voice for patients - 'HealthWatch'.
Harriett Baldwin explained,"Under Labour, there have been nine major reorganisations of the NHS. This has wasted £3billion of NHS money and demoralised the health professionals in the NHS. After all the reorganisations in Worcestershire, the Worcestershire Primary Care Trust is now configured in a similar way to 1997. All Gordon Brown talks about is the fact he has raised taxes to European levels, but we have not seen anywhere near the improvement in NHS services which this extra money should justify. Our aim is more ambitious: using these levels of funding, we want to deliver to patients an NHS which is the best healthcare system in Europe. We want the NHS to focus on helping patients get better, not on helping politicians look better. I also want to see fairer funding for Worcestershire, which currently gets significantly less NHS money than the UK average."