Hope of deliverance

Yesterday was a good day for people like pensioner Margaret Coates.

She made headlines in March because she faced blindness after her local PCT refused to fund the drug treatment needed to combat her wet age-related macular degeneration.

Bromley PCT said it would only fund treatment for those with unusual or unique clinical factors, and Mrs Coates had neither.

But the kind of issues affecting the pensioner could be a thing of the past in England if the recommendations in Lord Ara Darzi’s review of the NHS are put into practice.

One of the key tenets of Lord Darzi’s review is to ‘personalise’ – that word again – services to make them fit for everyone’s needs, “includ[ing] those people traditionally less likely to seek help or who find themselves discriminated against in some way”.

In addition, Lord Darzi says the NHS should “guarantee patients access to the most clinically and cost effective drugs and treatments” where the clinician recommends them.

Reading between the lines, this should mean that older people such as Mrs Coates will be able to get the treatment they need.

There was more good news in Lord Darzi’s report. The commitment to preventative healthcare should help pensioners and people with learning disabilities to remain in their own homes for longer.

A focus on quality rather than targets is also welcome. Putting the emphasis on providing quality, individual care and improving standards harks back to the earlier days of the NHS and is long overdue.

But while Lord Darzi’s report on the future of the NHS makes for heartening reading, it is up to the government to deliver on it and as ever this is the potential sticking point; neither he nor the government has made any mention – that I can find – of how this will be paid for.

This is worrying. The NHS is underfunded and implementing the recommendations of the report will not be cheap.

Where the extra money will come from to make good on these commitments is a mystery to me and without a coherent strategy for funding it I can see Lord Darzi’s report falling flat. That would be a great opportunity missed and people like Mrs Coates will still not receive the treatment they need.