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Improving patient experience through evidence-based interventions can only be welcomed. It may prove challenging at first; the national patient experience CQUIN goal has run for the past couple of years, but at a national level at least has struggled to yield improved results.

There needs to be a related programme of work, looking at exactly what patients can reasonably expect from the NHS. In the case of marginally-effective drugs or unevidenced alternative treatments, there will naturally be a conflict between satisfying the patient and effectively using resources.

Perhaps the societal change which will prove the greatest challenge to the NHS is a move from the postwar society with its values of shared sacrifice for a common good to an individualised consumerist worldview which asks "what about me?"