The Three Amigos: listening to worries over NHS reform

Am at The Three Amigos production in a Surrey Hospital launching the government listening process on NHS reforms.
The PM, DPM and Health Secretary are side by side…

(Listening hard? Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Andrew Lansley in Camberley, Surrey)

It’s very important David Cameron keeps Andrew Lansley onside – he has given him enormous responsibility with a charge, the NHS, he says is sacred. It would look like a colossal failure of judgment by Mr Cameron himself.

But the DPM has a big problem in his Lib Dem backyard. He acknowledged this morning that a pause in the middle of a bill was “a bit unusual” and said it was understandable people wanted accountability for GPs.

Andrew Lansley watched Nick Clegg like a hawk while he spoke and seemed to relieved to hear no ratcheting up of the rhetoric, something the Lib Dem leader has been felt to have done in some earlier interviews.

I suggested to David Cameron in the Q and A session that a “pause for thought” should probably happen before you start a massive reform like this – surgeons don’t pause for consultation halfway through major surgery. He said that was the wrong metaphor because this was evolutionary change not radical surgery.

Prof Steve Field who will head the government’s pause for re-think on NHS reforms just told me that he “can’t see how we can do it (the reforms) with just GPs on their own …. (there) needs to be clinical involvement, more meaningful patient involvement…” The Health Secretary says the same thing but it’s not clear how involved these non-GPs will be … Andrew Lansley says they will be “involved” in commissioning decisions.