20 March 2007
Tony Blair praised Department of Health workers today for making a difference and improving people’s lives.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
Read the statement
Patricia Hewitt:
" Prime Minister, friends, colleagues can I welcome you all here this morning particularly welcome you Tony, we’re absolutely delighted you’ve chosen to abandon Number 10, come down to Skipton House, share some of the morning with us. You’ve had a chance just going around the stalls to meet some of the policy and strategy teams that work, not just out of Skipton House but out of our other London Department of Health offices and I think although we have not by any means been able to show you all the different work that is done within the department I think what it’s very much reflected is what I was very struck by when I first became the Health Secretary is all human life is here…and death as well as colleagues over there reminded us! There is almost nothing that the Department of Health doesn’t deal with and I’m very glad that staff have been able to give you just a glimpse of the extraordinarily important and very creative and exciting work that they do every day, every week which all too often I’m afraid ministers don’t get a chance to see directly but….over to you Prime Minister"
Tony Blair:
"Thank you. Hi, how are you all? Good to see you…thank you for welcoming me here, it’s wonderful to come along and speak to you because really, well Patricia’s right as you know I am abandoning Number 10 and I want to, before I abandon it completely to say thank you to all of you for the work that you’re doing for the department and I know it’s a time of immense pressure and change but you do a fantastic job and at some point for all the pressure someone should say thank you so I’m principally here to say thank you.
I can tell it’s been a difficult morning, when I was going round the various presentations and I saw the one about 25% of people die of cancer and it’s got this little, other little sign saying 100% of people die and I thought ‘that’s just not good enough - we’ve got to do something about that!’ and I thought ‘no, no that’s the one you can’t do anything about’ but over these last few years there’s probably been more change going on in our health care system than ever before. It’s probably the biggest set of changes going through health care since the National Health Service was founded and one of the difficulties is when you go through a process of change it’s very hard for people and there’s a lot of resistance or worry or concern and all of that’s perfectly natural we’re also not helped by the fact, that I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but the media tend to focus on the negative somewhat - I have noticed this and sometimes what’s necessary is to get a sense of balance about the change that’s actually going on, and in fact health care in our country is improving and is improving reasonably rapidly and if we look back over these past few years many of the pieces of work that I’ve seen just going round here - whether it’s to do with the workforce or to do with the way that we treat certain conditions or to do with the way that we’re actually extracting more value out of the money that we put in there’s been a phenomenal set of changes - things like waiting, cancer treatment, heart treatment, Accident and Emergencies and so on there’s been a genuine revolution in the way that we treat people.
However, the challenges are all still there and the other thing I wanted to say as well as thank you was in a sense through you just to reiterate the point that unfortunately it is the nature of the world we live in today that the change is a continual process and again just as I go round and I see whether it’s in things like genetics or workforce reform or obviously health reform itself …you just understand how constantly as a result of technology as a result of the expectations of patients, new treatments that come on stream, new ways that people want to be treated - we live in a completely different world today.
Now I happen to think that in the end the only way a health service works for the future is a partnership between people and the State or the National Health Service. In other words that in today’s world it’s not just about what the consultants or the doctors or the NHS or the Government hands down to you, people want a far more collaborative relationship - a partnership relationship with the people that are treating them.
Now that means that in part they want greater choice over what happens to them, they want greater say over what happens to them - but it’s also that they’ve got to take some responsibility for their own health and one of the other things that we’ve got to get across to people is that in the end healthcare today is not just about ‘The Government’ ‘The National Health Service’ ‘the doctors’ ‘the nurses’ the people who work in the health services it’s also about us as citizens and people and what we’re prepared to do for ourselves so all of this means that the process of change that you’ve been driving from here and I know a lot of the changes actually happened here in this department, that process of change is going to go on - it’s not something that I think anyone can responsibly say is suddenly going to come to an end.
The great thing however, and you can see this, is in how many different ways we are leading the agenda today as opposed to following an agenda set by others. I mean I think not merely of the work that we’re doing in this country but the work that we do abroad as well in healthcare, I think of the way that the workforce in the NHS is changing the whole time and I think too of the fact that we’re getting in new providers, different ways of doing things, different ways of trying to make sure that people access the highest quality care.
I think the most difficult thing about working in Government is that, you know, the feeling sometimes outside is that kind of we’re all just sort of sitting there, and in this sense ‘we’ political leaders and ‘you’ part of the civil service are in the same bracket in this, people kind of think sometimes we’re just sitting there thinking "How can we make life really difficult for you out there?" I mean do you ever get that feeling that that’s what they think?
Actually what we’re trying to do is manage processes and operations that are many times more difficult than the process and operations that our top entrepreneurs manage within their own businesses. I mean I was talking to someone in the business world the other day who had his board meeting and they had a particular problem that they’d been sorting out in their company and during the board meeting, one of his executives said "You know I was just thinking, how difficult is it for us to get this particular process right.. I was just thinking what must it be like if you’re trying to run the National Health Service?"
And it’s true - you know the scale of what people are trying to do here, the complexity of it is different in its intensity and scope to probably anything that any, even major multinational company faces and so occasionally I think it’s right that you get thanks and gratitude for what you’re doing.
Because you are making a difference, you’re improving people’s lives and you’re doing it in circumstances where the challenges are more immense than the challenges probably faced by other people possibly even paid more than yourselves in the outside world.
So it’s…you know that’s really what I wanted to come along today and say and….as I near to the end of my time as Prime Minister and I look back over these ten years I think what you have done in this Department I think should be of immense pride to you and I would simply like to say this morning, on my own behalf most particularly actually but on behalf of the Government thank you for what you’ve done, thank you."
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