NHS

NHS



NHS

Introduction

National Health Service or NHS is considered as the basic caretaker of a patient. The organization takes on some interventions for the treatment of patients with broad range of diseases and conditions. The technology is changing rapidly, extending the range of treatments available, saving and improving lives from the time of birth to old age (Department of Health 2006). The funding decisions are based on factors that whether to fund treatments for people is based in critical analysis of the situation of patients and the requirement of treatment. This paper in connection to NHS services will provide an outline regarding the statement whether the NHS is underperforming in cancer services or it is providing the services to the patients up to the mark, and how NHS can contain the increasing cost of cancer without affecting the service.

Public Health Problems and NHS

Many of our worst public health problems have already reached crisis point. Britain now has the highest obesity rates in Europe; we have among the worst rates of sexually transmitted infection; and we are seeing rising rates of alcohol and drug problems. Despite attempts by the Government to improve our health, a quarter of adults and a sixth of children are now obese - up from one in seven adults and one in ten children in 1993. More than ten per cent of the population - 7.6 million people - are drinking at hazardous levels (Barret and McMahon, 1990). The death-toll from tobacco use is also immense; smoking is responsible for around 84,000 deaths every year in the UK.

Labour's approach to managing healthcare has not allowed a proper focus on these problems. Activity is increasingly being focused on achieving bureaucratic targets for acute services, like operations, leaving too little room for preventative care that could cut down the need for treatments in the first place. This is one reason why our national health trends, such as cancer survival rates, still seriously lag behind the European average, despite that fact that we spend the European average on our healthcare.

But there is also a more 'cultural' aspect to this problem: people's personal choices - to drink to dangerous levels, for example - are driving up ill health and its public costs. Britain fares worse than other countries in terms of lifestyle problems that lead to major causes of premature death, like heart disease, cancer and stroke.

Britain has become one of the least cohesive and most socially divided countries in Europe. The decline of our community and civic life has been made worse by cuts to local services that are essential to well-being (like health visitors) and by policies such as 24 hour alcohol licensing. Rising rates of family breakdown, teenage pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse among children have not been tackled properly. When government allows society to weaken, we see a damaging decline in social responsibility. Troublesome binge drinking is fuelled by irresponsible alcohol marketing; rising child obesity is encouraged by the decline in the ...