Reducing the time from soup to nuts

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7498.988

BMJ 2005;330:988 (30 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7498.988

News

2005 UK election special

Reducing the time from soup to nuts

Nicholas Timmins, public policy editor

Financial Times

Everything in the Labour party's plan for the NHS is subordinateto the need to increase capacity and to bring down the waitingtime between seeing a GP and having an operation. Nick Timminsreports

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

At election time some people (probably, in truth, a small andrather sad minority) pore over the parties' manifestos. Theyare often a pretty poor guide to the future. No one could possiblyhave gleaned from the Conservative manifesto for health in 1987,for example, that by 1992 the NHS would be operating an internalmarket. The big financial crisis late in 1987 that triggeredthe Conservatives' NHS review was just about visible; its outcome,to all but clairvoyants and those now granted the gift of hindsight,was not.

Equally, a newly landed Martian reading Labour's 1997 manifestoand looking at the NHS today would be entitled to wonder howon earth we got from there to here. That manifesto contained,for example, no mention of the National Institute for ClinicalExcellence or the creation of an NHS inspectorate and a socialcare inspectorate, a clinical assessment authority, or a . . . [Full text of this article]

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