Mr Brown joined citizens, patients, doctors and nurses in Birmingham to discuss the future of the National Health Service in the largest consultation on the future of the health service ever conducted.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Gordon Brown:
I think the patient wants to be involved in the decisions about the future of the health service more than ever before.
Woman #1:
Let’s go to our first polling question. OK. Let’s see what we’re saying there. So six out of ten of you would be prepared for it to take longer to get there.
Woman #2:
We also thought that we need to be more creative about how we access the public and patients. We need to work with communities, eg. locate GPs in shopping centres.
Woman #1:
We’re going to go and hear back from some of the other regions.
Woman #3:
On access, I think a quote from one of the tables is a key point: “Having an illness isn’t a nine-to-five thing.”
Woman #4
Some of the really big themes that are coming out are around access, as we’ve seen from the other areas.
Gordon Brown:
What I’m hearing and what I’m going to act upon is that people want more access to the GP, out of hours, at weekends. They want a higher quality of service and personal care when they go to a hospital. They want the hospital to be clean and they want it to be safe. And, of course, they want us also to make sure that we move further and faster in curing some of the diseases of our time. This is not just a one-off exercise. This is a genuine attempt to bring the people who care about the health service most, the users and the staff in the health service, together, to say you can only make sensible decisions about the health service for the future by involving the patients and the staff in doing so. I believe we can create a great health service in the future, but I believe we can only do it by working together, and I hope you’ve benefited as much as me from this discussion today. Thank you all very much, in every part of the country, for being part of something that’s going to change the health service and I hope change the health service substantially for the better in the years to come. Thank you very much.
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