'Courageous action' required to ensure NHS makes 75th birthday

The health service faces “significant financial and demand pressures”, said Mike Farrar, head of the NHS Confederation.

He said there needs to be a “radical shift” in the way the health service delivers care.

Writing a foreword for a new report on the coming challenges for the NHS, Mr Farrar said: “Sixty-five years from its foundation, the NHS remains a great source of national pride. But the service today is under significant financial and demand pressures that, as this report explores, only look set to increase.

“The result is a decade ahead that will see the NHS facing challenges greater than any it has had to deal with in its lifetime - challenges that demand a radical shift in the way we think about health and how we deliver care.

“On the 65th anniversary of the NHS it is right that we celebrate its great achievements. But we must also look to the future and work together to set an agenda for change that meets the needs of the population it serves.”

The new report, conducted by consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, concludes that the public, care providers, regulators, commissioners and policy makers must take “deliberate and courageous action” to transform the NHS or it may not exist in its current form in 10 years.

The report recommends that the NHS moves from “fragmented to integrated care”.

Many have said that as the health service moves forward it must work better to integrate health and social care.

Meanwhile, a survey of 1,000 doctors, conducted by the British Medical Association, found that almost half of medics believe that greater integration between health and social care was the most important factor to ensure the NHS survives another 65 years.

The poll found that 47.4 per cent of medics believed better joining-up of the services would help the NHS continue.

Last week, chancellor George Osborne announced there would be a new £3.8bn pooled health and social care fund. Mr Osborne said the money, which will be used by local health services and councils to join up services, will “end the scandal of older people trapped in hospitals”.

But others have said that the move does not go far enough.

The NHS was officially launched on 5 July 1948 by health secretary Aneurin Bevan.

It revolutionised healthcare, giving millions of people a service they had previously been denied.

It was the first system of its kind in the world and people queued in the streets in the hope of getting treatment.

Sixty-five years on the principles guiding the NHS remain the same, although the health landscape has undoubtedly changed.

Mark Porter, chairman of council at the BMA, said the NHS faces twin political and economic pressures at present.

He said the government’s health reforms have taken attention away from the NHS’s £20bn productivity drive, adding: “The attention of the system was taken off that, and many people’s attention was directed towards organisational readjustment; towards changing the structures of the organisations in the NHS, which is an ongoing thing.

“We now know that treasury projections going forward to 2021 and 2022 are effectively flat cash. And that’s really worrying because there has been, consistently, for the first 65 years of the NHS, a fairly direct relationship between the quality of care we can give and the resources going in.

“The biggest challenge to the NHS today is, how can we continue to either extend or even deliver out basic service when what we know from history is that we need a year-on-year increase?”

He said that on the NHS’s 100th birthday in 2048, the service will not look the way it does today.

“If you look 50 years ago, it was completely different.

“For 65 years, the central tenet of the NHS has been to provide a comprehensive service, a universal service, a service that is free at the point of need, and a service that is provided by a professional core.

“But those things are the centrally important things about the NHS, and I think that on the 100th anniversary, those things aren’t guaranteed to be there, but they can be, and they should be, and they must be.”