David Cameron speech on NHS reforms

David Cameron speech on NHS reforms; Cameron interview SOT - So this is the consensus: no change is not an option. But we have to make sure it is the right change, delivered in the right way. Change needs to go to the heart of the current problems I have described......and the future challenges I have set out. It must tackle the waste and the bureaucracy by reducing the overlapping layers we have today.It must put the patient centre stage, giving them choices and chances that they are currently denied. It must promote prevention and a healthier nation, which must mean giving GPs who are our first contact with the system and have a good understanding of their area's health needs a wider role. It must tackle the longstanding and damaging divide between health and social care, including the bed blocking that still afflicts so many of our hospitals. It must assist with the challenge to increase efficiency, raise productivity and keep costs down so we can go on meeting everyone's needs. Change must do all these things but change - if it is to endure, to really work - should have the support of people who work in our NHS. We have to take our nurses and doctors with us. They provide the care, they know what's best for patients so we want to work with them, not against them. Already, a significant number are on board with what we propose. Last week, GPs representing 1,100 practices across England, caring for over seven million patients, wrote to The Daily Telegraph expressing their wholehearted support for our reforms to commissioning arrangements arguing they will benefit the most vulnerable in society. But we recognise that many doctors and nurses have concerns about what we're doing. That's why at the beginning of last month, we decided we should pause, listen, reflect on and improve our NHS modernisation plans. And since then, that's what we have been doing. In the past six weeks, I've sat with staff in hospitals in Frimley, Reading and Darlington have held events i...