You could easily be forgiven for concluding, from the coverage of recent months, that the NHS had ceased to provide hospital care, laid off the last doctor and the last nurse, and collapsed under a weight of debt that would have made the directors of Enron blush. To contend that this is not the case is not to make light of what has been a difficult year, which has indeed been painful for staff and sometimes patients, especially in those NHS Trusts which had built up financial problems over the years (or had simply not been very well managed financially). However, if we don’t see the bigger picture, we run the risk of making some very serious mistakes about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the delivery of that most crucial of services- healthcare.

Happily, here in Westminster, we have a Primary Care Trust which has balanced its books, has been assessed as one of the top performing Trusts of its kind in the country, and is continuing to expand and improve services. Amongst a number of impressive recent achievements were: a 25% improvement in flu protection for pensioners; £400,000 worth of programmes targeted on health improvements in poorer communities, and the launch of a healthy eating and physical activity scheme for children, designed to tackle a particular local problem of child obesity. In the autumn, Health@The Stowe became the second new health centre to open in a year in Westbourne, and a new surgery is also scheduled for the St John’s hospital in St John’s Wood. Mental health services have been rebuilt in a £30 million scheme based at St Charles, finally replacing the depressing and inappropriate facility at the Paterson Wing at St Mary’s. St Mary’s itself has just received £15 million for a new high dependence unit, and is also about to develop new links with Imperial College and the Hammersmith hospitals, in an exciting partnership that will bring some of the world’s leading medical research to bear on local patient care. Oh, and £2 million is earmarked for the next phase of work towards further reducing hospital waiting times, as we progress towards the 18 week target.

Looked at nationally, 97% if all hospital outpatients appointments took place within 13 weeks of referral in September 2006, up from 83% in 1997. 75% of inpatient admissions took place within 13 weeks, up from 50%- and waits of twelve months and more, which were frequent a decade ago, are now exceptionally rare. Perhaps all this is connected to the fact that there are 66,000 more qualified nurses, 29,000 more doctors, and that new contracts have delivered greatly improved pay for GPs and hospital doctors.

So yes, there has been some turmoil in the last few months, as changes in service patterns and the impact of improved levels of doctor’s pay impacted on local budgets. But to ignore the real local and national achievements plays into the hands of the ‘nothing works’ brigade- and they are the ones who usually have least to lose from dismantling a service for the many, so that they can protect the interests of the few.