Gordon Brown speech on health and social care reform

Gordon Brown speech on health and social care reform; Brown speech SOT- The Waiting Time Guarantee: that there will be no return to the long-waits which plagued the NHS before 1997. Our guarantee is that no-one should wait longer than 18 weeks from the moment of GP referral to hospital treatment. Today in fact the average wait is less than 10 weeks. The GP Access Guarantee: we intend that everyone will have the choice of GP services open on evenings or at weekends in their area. And to back this up we will abolish GP practice boundaries so that everyone can register with the GP most convenient for their needs, be that near their home or place of work. And a Health Check Guarantee. In the next parliament everyone between 40 and 74 offered a regular health check on the NHS - something for too long available only if you paid in the private sector. So we choose, through guarantees, to provide a universal service of high standards personal to all - not a lottery of care where those most in need are most likely to suffer. If we are to offer people truly personalised care we must also commit to far wider reform in our community and primary healthcare services. In the NHS as well as through a new National Care Service we want to extend the offer of care in the home. This will be at the heart of our vision for the NHS and for social care in the next Parliament. Choice, control and personalisation is not just something for the young - the choices people make later in their lives might be different, but the right to a choice, to personalised care is just as important if not more so.- So Andy Burnham will bring forward proposals to extend the entitlements that people have to specialist care in their home - care in chemotherapy dialysis and in other areas too.- And let me take this opportunity to pay tribute to Marie Curie Cancer Care who are doing so much across the NHS to ensure that everyone who wants to die at home has the right to do so, and let me say now that we ...