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The Labour government has launched the biggest national conversation about the future of the NHS since its birth, calling on the entire country to share their experiences of the health service. The feedback will be used to shape the government's 10 Year Health Plan to fix the "broken" health service and deliver its mission to build an NHS fit for the future. Members of the public, as well as NHS staff and experts, are invited to share their experiences, views and ideas for the future of NHS via a new online platform that goes live today. The Change NHS online platform, which will be live until the start of next year, is also available via the NHS App. The public engagement exercise will focus on three shifts in healthcare - hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.

Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting has on Wednesday laid out his vision for reforming the National Health Service, stating that the NHS is "broken but not beaten" after years of Conservative governance. In his address to the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Streeting highlighted the current challenges facing the NHS, including record-high waiting lists, ambulance delays, and difficulties in accessing GP appointments. Stressing that "reform or die" is the choice facing the NHS, he rejected the idea of simply increasing funding without systemic changes. Streeting noted some initial successes since Labour took office, including employing 1,000 more GPs and negotiating an end to junior doctors' strikes. He revealed that crack teams of top clinicians will be deployed to hospitals across the country to roll out reforms: to treat more patients and cut waiting lists.

The Labour government published its elective care reform plan today (6 January), outlining the necessary steps to reduce patient waiting times, including expanding non-surgical ENT [ear, nose and throat] services in community pharmacies. As set out in its 'Plan for Change', the government aims to restore the constitutional standard of 92 per cent of patients receiving treatment within 18 weeks by March 2029. Additionally, it plans to address the ongoing challenges in meeting cancer waiting time standards. Health secretary Wes Streeting emphasised the urgency of reform, highlighting that over 6 million people are currently on a waiting list, waiting for more than 7 million episodes of care, like a test or an operation. Streeting said: "For those millions of people, the fundamental promise of our NHS - that it will be there for us when we need it - has not been delivered. This can't go on." "The actions in this plan will reform elective care, giving patients timely local access to diagnostic testing, with straight to test pathways and action to reform outpatient care,

Over the last few years, we've seen the aftermath of Covid-19, with the demand for consumer health products being unprecedented and unpredictable, placing pressure on supply chains and labour market. In turn, the industry has experienced acute shortages across the healthcare sector, placing huge pressure on pharmacists, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. Europe has an estimated shortage of around 50,000 public-sector doctors[1], which is set to increase in the coming years. While this shortage stems from several complex problems, there is a hidden force that could play a key part in helping to alleviate this burden. That force is the potential of self-care. Encouragingly, last month the UK government recognised the unique role that self-care can play through the introduction of its Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care. Through this, it has pledged to empower patients to manage their own health through several commitments, including improving accessibility to online tools and reclassifying medicines to make formerly prescribed options available over the counter.

Pharmacy contractors, particularly those in England and Northern Ireland, faced an extremely challenging 2024. The general election delayed the new Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF) negotiations leaving pharmacies in England having to endure further hardship, as a frankly unfit 2019 contract, was effectively extended. We have witnessed pharmacy closures on a weekly basis and it is clear that an increasing number of English contractors are struggling to pay their wholesaler bills on time. It is unacceptable that the Government have allowed this to happen. In Scotland and Wales settlements have factored in inflation, which is essential for the future. Whilst we should be cautiously optimistic about the NHS plan under the new Labour government, I'm acutely aware that the sector urgently needs an injection of cash to help offset the last five years of chronic underfunding. The next English CPCF must be inflation linked, the sector cannot absorb ever-increasing costs. Pharmacy teams already work incredibly hard to deliver care to their patients and communities.

In his first speech as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting MP acknowledged that the NHS is in crisis while outlining his mission to save the health service. Streeting described the current state of the NHS as "broken," noting its failure to meet the needs of both patients and dedicated healthcare professionals. "When we said during the election campaign, that the NHS was going through the biggest crisis in its history, we meant it. "When we said that patients are being failed on a daily basis, it wasn't political rhetoric, but the daily reality faced by millions," he said on Friday (5 July). The new health secretary remarked that previous governments had been unwilling to admit these simple facts.