We are now well into the election campaign and of course, the NHS is featuring prominently across all the parties. Some of the comments are wide of the truth as we know, and other promises will get watered down and may not happen. I try and avoid politics in these blogs, and I am not going to change this now, in fairness to everyone’s personal views. However...

One recent notable pledge was an increase in the number of appointments available a week by 40,000 — sounds good.

Extending working hours to weekends and evenings sounds logical; incentives to work overtime and so on. 
The building of one hundred new surgeries sounds promising.

However, one problem with all this is: where are the staff needed to run all this going to come from?
It takes years to train doctors and nurses, as well as attracting other staff into the sector.

I was interested in a politician who admitted that Primary Care does 90% of the work for only 10% of the budget and that their party would alter this.

This argument has always been the case well before the last 14 years so to say that this present government is solely to blame is not fair.

In the years I have been writing blogs for FPM I have always advocated that the NHS should be cross-party and that a general discussion around funding and implementation looking ahead 20 or 30 (even 40) years is the way forward.

This could look at social care, mental health care, and a more integrated care system. If there was an extra 1% tax increase, guaranteed to go to the NHS was in place, (which I am sure many people would be happy to pay on that basis) we could begin a long-term recovery plan.

But every time there is a change of government, there is a change of direction, which is just not workable. 
We have also been told that a record amount of money is currently being put into the NHS. Great, but is it being well spent? Are we getting value for money?

We are all aware of the wastage, and yet nothing gets done. Would we spend our own income in this way? Where is the accountability?

Until the above are tackled, I feel we will not see any improvement in the performance of the NHS.

So, will this election make a difference? Sadly, I fear not. The main parties have different views on the NHS moving forward and at the end of the day, there appears no appetite to be bold and make the tough decisions needed.

Whoever gets in and whoever we vote for, we are looking at some challenging times ahead, with the health of the population not being treated as we are entitled to feel it should be.