The NHS is underfunded. Even a former Tory health secretary sees it | Gaby Hinsliff

The health service is in crisis – as Andrew Lansley’s comments on the screening that could have caught his cancer make plain

The former Conservative health secretary was diagnosed with bowel cancer after his wife nagged him into seeing his GP about his back pain. While his prospects would have been better if it had been caught earlier, things could be worse. He is still fairly optimistic about recovering, and he isn’t asking for your sympathy – although it was classy of the shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, to offer Labour’s anyway.

What he does seem to want, however, is for his own party to acknowledge that lucky isn’t good enough, either for him or for the millions of over-55s in England and Wales supposed to benefit from a national screening programme to detect and treat bowel cancer early. This was something Lansley himself piloted in office, before finding out the hard way that it hasn’t been delivered as planned.

Continue reading... April 03, 2018 at 05:16PM