NHS & Social Care
NHS & Social Care
The NHS is broken - we are living longer, with more complex medical issues and trying to fund the service in the way it was originally designed. Councils are collapsing under the demands of social care when our council tax was never designed for this purpose.
Its time to rethink health and how it is funded.
We need to put people at the heart of the service, bringing the NHS and social care together so that we consider the needs of the patient, both physical and mental, and dont expect them to navigate systems that compete for funding. But we need to do our bit too. As patients - and taxpayers - we need to pay our fair share, we need to consider whether its time to make a small contribution when we attend a GP, we need to be honest about the growing cost of medication challenging the pharmaceutical sector and we need to recognise that if we want highly trained, motivated staff we need to pay them well, show them the respect they deserve and let them focus on their patients.
These are my key messages on NHS and Social Care reform:
- Proper funding for hospice care, especially children's hospice and end of life care
- Rethink how we fund medical, dentistry and mental health education and training and retain professionals in the NHS
- Parity of mental and physical health
- Ensuring every child has access to free NHS dentistry and that the wider community can access low cost oral healthcare
- Cross party commission on funding elderly and dementia care
- Public health to focus on prevention so we need to draw less on the NHS
- The GP guarantee. 1 in 10 people in Dorset wait more than 3 weeks for an appointment, we need to rethink the work of GPs so people can see their doctor within 7 days or in 24 hrs where urgent
- Increasing support to unpaid carers building on the Lib Dem led Carers Leave Act