NHS Health Screening Plan Launched Jan 08

Some key quotes from Gordon Brown’s speech on the NHS at King’s College London on 7th January 2008:

'The NHS of the future will do more than just treat patients who are ill - it will be an NHS offering prevention as well.

Growing expectations about choice, access, and convenience in healthcare are a fact of modern life.

That is why giving patient’s choices through reforms to encourage plurality of provision, create a genuine level playing field between competing local providers and allow money to follow the patient are so important in building a more responsive and more accessible healthcare system.

But today, with the ageing population and a rise in so-called 'lifestyle diseases', the NHS finds itself with new challenges in supporting and caring for patients with long-term conditions.

And as more of us live longer we need to put support in place to help us all stay active into old age, and thus to stay healthy - adding life to years... not just years to life.

Over time everyone in England will have access to the right preventative health check-up.

In the next few months Alan Johnson will set out plans to introduce to the NHS a series of tests to identify vulnerability to heart and circulation problems.

And we will extend the availability of diagnostic procedures in the GP surgery - making blood tests, ECGs and in some cases ultrasounds available and on offer not only when you are acutely unwell or if you can pay, but when you want and need them, where you need them, at the local surgery.

This will depend on a new flexibility and responsiveness in primary care, and new partnerships with the voluntary and private sectors where they can contribute and innovate.

So we will strengthen commissioning, give more responsibility to primary care professionals and open up primary care: with more providers, new primary care services, and more weekend and evening access.

We will use all mechanisms available to us to improve our NHS - public, private and voluntary providers can all play their part and there will be no 'no-go areas' for reform as we seek to deliver the preventive and personal services which will renew and secure the health service for the future.’