Experts say next UK government should declare a national health and care emergency medicalxpress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medicalxpress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The British Medical Journal has taken the somewhat extraordinary step of calling on the next UK government to declare a “national health and care emergency".
Next Govt Urged to Declare National Health, Care Emergency miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>The government in post after the election should declare a national health and care emergency, calling on all parts of society to help improve health, care, and wellbeing, say experts in the first report of <strong><a href="https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/KeDOCk6Q8sOlMMgc2mL-b?domain=bmj.com" target=" blank">The BMJ Commission on the Future of the NHS</a>.</strong></p>
The first report of the BMJ Commission on the Future of the NHS calls for the declaration of a national health and care emergency and an urgent reset for the NHS
Just before the National Health Service began in the UK, Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health in 1948, wrote in The BMJ : “On July 5 there is no reason why the whole of the doctor-patient relationship should not be freed from what most of us feel should be irrelevant to it, the money factor. The picture I have always visualized is one … of a nation deciding to make healthcare easier and more effective by pooling its resources each sharing the cost as [they] can through regular taxation and otherwise while [they are] well, and each able to use the resulting resources if and when [they are] ill.”1
Since Bevan outlined his vision, health, healthcare, and wider society have vastly changed. Life expectancy has improved from 70 years for females and 66 years for males in 1948, to 83 years and 79 years respectively in 2020.2