One of the three major shifts that the Labour Party will utilise to reform the health system under a Labour administration is technology, according to Labour Leader Keir Starmer.
In a speech on Monday in Essex, Starmer emphasised that the nature of sickness has significantly altered from one that needs urgent and acute hospital care to one that requires, above all, management of chronic, long-term disorders.
For the NHS to be financially viable, Starmer identified three fundamental changes that must take place. He explained that the first step entails bringing care closer to the community and away from hospitals adding that the NHS “must become a Neighbourhood Health Service.”
The second shift entails avoiding the idea that health is solely about illness and emphasising prevention, including lowering three of the nation’s leading causes of death: cancer, cardiovascular disease, and suicide.
According to Starmer, the difference in inequality across the various regions of England would be halved as a result of this move. Shift number two requires that we put prevention first and depart from the mentality that health is solely about illness.
The third shift, according to him, entails leveraging technology to speed up the first two shifts and create a different sort of healthcare, one that results in lower waiting times, superior treatment, early diagnosis, and meaningful prevention.
“With artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, and new vaccines, we stand on the cusp of a revolution that could transform healthcare for the better,” he said.
“My message today is this – science and technology are the game-changers. This is what will make the NHS fit for the future.”
Placing the power in the hands of the patients
Although 33 million individuals downloaded the NHS app during the pandemic, Starmer claimed that the tremendous opportunity has so far mainly been lost.
He claimed that Labour, whose 2015 manifesto neglected to emphasise using IT more, will take the app and similar inventions and expand them, placing them in the hands of patients and using them to change their relationship with the NHS.
Moving towards entirely digitised patient records, proper self-referral channels, reminders for screenings and checkups, the most recent treatment recommendations, and “patients in control of their own data” are all part of this, according to him.
In addition to giving patients more choice and power, technology also has the ability to save lives, according to Starmer. “Choosing how it’s used and how it’s shared, this will get rid of a divide between those confident to speak up for themselves and those who can’t,” he continued.
He gave the case of lung cancer, where 274,000 patients had to wait at least 11 days for the scan findings.
When applied effectively by a radiologist, the expert claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) could, in addition to reducing workload and increasing productivity, minimise missed lung cancer diagnoses by 60%.
Finally, Starmer said:
“To make this happen, innovators need one route into the NHS, not many, incentives to innovate throughout the system, fewer barriers to adoption, fewer hurdles to clear, less bureaucracy, more clinical trials, and a government that uses its full power to back our world-leading life sciences.”
