Some NHS patients have received a “death sentence” due to delays within the health service, Wes Streeting has said, as Keir Starmer stressed the need for more use of AI and technology.
The health secretary was speaking alongside the prime minister at the launch of what they described as the “biggest national conversation about the future of the NHS since it was founded 76 years ago”.
But while Keir Starmer tried to take an optimistic tone, alluding to the benefits and opportunities that could arise from a public conversation, Streeting warned the NHS is in “such a poor state, I’m amazed we’re not still using carrier pigeons”.
Streeting said: “The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it’s people struggling to get access to their GP, dialling 999 and an ambulance not arriving in time, turning up to A&E departments and waiting far too long, sometimes on trolleys in corridors, or going through the ordeal of knowing that you’re waiting for a diagnosis that could be the difference between life and death.
“Worse still, receiving a prognosis that amounts to a death sentence that could have been avoided, because the NHS didn’t reach you in time.
“That is, I’m afraid, the daily reality in the NHS today.”
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Streeting said he hopes a reformed NHS app would help streamline the health service, and will be as “easy and as joyful” to use as Netflix. He championed plans to digitise the health service to improve the patient experience, and soon to allow them to access any NHS service “at the touch of a button, not at the end of a telephone”.
Streeting told reporters in east London: “I think people in our country are angry that interacting with their public services is not as easy, accessible or even joyful as any number of other applications we have in the palm of our hand.
“We’ve got more subscribers to the NHS app, for example, than Netflix, so using the NHS app should be as easy and even as joyful as using Netflix, and unless we embrace the technology revolution we will continue to have a public sector that is creaking and lagging far behind every other service in our life, because it hasn’t kept up with the times.”
Meanwhile, Starmer cited the benefits of using of artificial intelligence as he highlighted his ambition to transform the NHS and indicated his plans to “reimagine the NHS when it comes to cancer” technology.
Speaking to the Guardian, the prime minister said: “Labour governments traditionally would pick up the NHS after Tory governments and give it more money to get it back on its feet. The ambition here is not just to sort of run the health service [better] than it’s been run in the last 14 years, it is to transform it.
“If you look at the challenges in 1948, in the 40s, in that period when the NHS was set up, they were very different to the challenges now. So even without this funding challenge, you’d be wanting to reimagine the NHS when it comes to cancer.
“This is where AI is going to be really important for us, because already, if you have a radiologist working with AI doing the scanning, the chances of getting cancer [diagnoses] more accurately, getting it much more early, will go up dramatically. So this allows us to get in earlier with cancer.”
New laws are set to be introduced on Wednesday that aim to speed up patient care, minimise medication errors and reduce repeat medical tests.
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