NHS will be radically changed, care must remain top of agenda

Commissioner Dr Deirdre Kelly said the NHS faces a huge challenge in providing high quality healthcare with a restricted budget, but believes the UK’s health service has the “most wonderful workforce” and provides “value and quality.”

At the Lunar Society Annual Dinner at Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens, Dr Kelly who was awarded the Lunar Medal 2012, said that she had worked in lots of health services around the world but had “been impressed by the motivation of the NHS.”

She said “We are of course, for the value and quality that we achieve, very much cheaper than America which uses twice as much as the budget and produces not much better in the way of outcomes.”

“The NHS is always facing challenges related to the difficulties in providing high quality healthcare with a restricted budget and as medicine continues to expand and develop, expectations of physicians and surgeons and patients exceed our ability to pay for them.”

“Essentially the structure of the NHS currently in order of paying and providing care is going to be very radically changed,” she said. “Any time of transition is a time of challenge, and one that is very important to keep patient care and safety at the top of the agenda.”

She added “The NHS is privileged to have the most wonderful workforce, nearly everyone comes to work wanting to make a change, and do something different.”

Dr Deirdre Kelly is Professor of Paediatric Hepatology at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and has set up the Paediatric Liver Unit at the same hospital. Providing a national and international service for children with liver failure and undergoing liver transplantation, the unit was the only national unit to be designated for small bowel and liver transplantation in the UK, until 2009.