The NHS’s workload is “likely to go up, not down”, Sir Keir Starmer warned, as he hinted at reforms the Government might make to assist healthcare staff.
Health service workers pressed the Prime Minister about his plans to help them deal with winter pressures and the post-Covid backlog as he visited a West Midlands hospital after Wednesday’s Budget announcement alongside Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
The tax rises and increased borrowing in the Budget provide a £3.1 billion increase in the NHS’s capital funding, aimed at buying new equipment and building new hospitals.
Ms Reeves described this as the “largest real-terms growth in day-to-day NHS spending outside of Covid since 2010”.
Despite the extra investment, Sir Keir was frank with health workers about the future the service faces.
“I also want to be honest with you – we are going to be asking more of you. There’s no point me standing here and saying your workload will go down,” he told NHS staff at University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire.
“The whole point is people are living longer, they’ve got more conditions. What the NHS is facing now is different to what it was facing in the post-war period; your workload is likely to go up, not down.”
He added: “Are we going to help you therefore? Yes.”
Sir Keir said he wants to make sure “that AI and technology is your friend”, so that some things “can be done better and differently”, including eliminating the need to take “the same details from the same patient over and over”.
He signalled that he wants to carry out a “reimagining of the NHS” while Labour is in power.
Asked how he can ensure new NHS funding in the Budget translates into addressing staffing gaps and preventing winter pressures, Sir Keir said he plans to provide a “mindset change” from the Conservatives, whom he claimed “blamed” NHS staff for problems in the service.
“It is going to take time, but what we did in the Budget yesterday is the first step, the down-payment if you like, down that road, to make sure that you can do your jobs better and we can have the NHS that we need.”
The Chancellor, meanwhile, criticised the previous government for “always raiding the capital budgets” and taking funding away from investment.
Ms Reeves said: “We have got to make those longer-term investments to drive those productivity and efficiency reforms as well.”
