NHS Charges to be Dropped
Patients with long-term illnesses such as cancer will not have to pay prescription charges, the prime minister has announced.Gordon Brown revealed the move as part of a raft of measures marking the 60th anniversary of the NHS during his speech at the Labour party conference on Tuesday.
"We must do more to relieve the financial worry that so often goes alongside the heartache", he told delegates.
To much applause, Brown promised that cancer patients will not have to pay any prescription charges from next year.
Patients with other long term conditions would see charges abolished over the next few years as the NHS made cash savings in its drug budgets, he said.
Brown described Labour as "the party of the NHS", having doubled the number of matrons, reduced cases of MRSA by 36 per cent and achieved the "lowest ever waiting times" in the NHS' history.
"We created it, we saved it, we value it and we will always support it," he told delegates triumphantly. The Conservative alternative, he said, would have been no new investment in the NHS.
The prime minister talked again of the childhood injury that left him with poor sight in one eye, a subject he first aired at last year's conference speech. This year, he revealed that an NHS operation had saved the sight in his other eye soon afterwards. "Care my parents could never have afforded", he explained.
It was for that reason he was "so passionate about the values of the NHS and so committed to reforming it to serve those values better".
Care
As well as abolishing prescription charges for patients with long-term illnesses, he announced that they would get their own care plan for the first time.
There would also, from April, be free universal check ups for everyone over 40, he promised. "I've always found it unfair that we cannot offer on the NHS the comprehensive services that private patients can afford to buy", he said.
Turning to medical research, Brown promised that the £15bn invested would be "directed to turning the major advances of the last few years into actual treatments and cures for NHS patients".
The rule change on charges for cancer patients comes just weeks before the expected publication of a Department of Health review into whether patients should be allowed to pay privately for drugs that are not available on the NHS.
Professor Mike Richards, the government’s national clinical director for cancer, is due to report in October on whether the ban on such co-payments should be dropped. On the morning of Brown's speech, The Times' front page speculated that minister's were preparing for such an eventuality.
The current system has seen NHS treatment withdrawn from a number of cancer patients who had opted to pay for additional drugs, leaving them to pay for all aspects of their care privately.
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