Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting say the 10-year health plan will usher in a “new era for the NHS” in England. Their promised transformation will ensure it works in a more patient-friendly way and offers faster care, with health professionals providing a greater range of services in the same place and spotting illness earlier.
The “three big shifts” in the way the health service operates will involve it becoming more tech-based, moving significant amounts of care into community settings and giving greater priority to preventing illness rather than treating it.
But, as the Health Foundation chief executive, Dr Jennifer Dixon, said: “These ambitions have appeared in NHS plans for decades.”
So how different is Labour’s new NHS plan from its predecessors?
2000: Then prime minister Tony Blair and his health secretary Alan Milburn unveiled the NHS plan.
This set out how the service would spend the significant extra money that flowed from Blair’s pledge months earlier to raise health spending to the European Union average, after the NHS had suffered a winter crisis in 1999-2000.
It led to the NHS getting more staff, more beds, more equipment and new facilities. It also set out shorter waiting times for patients to access treatment and gave them more choice over their care. And it included new partnerships between the NHS and the private sector.
The plan is widely credited with kickstarting the rebuilding of the NHS after years of neglect under the Conservatives and leading to patients getting the quickest access to care ever seen.
2014: Then NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens published the Five Year Forward View.
It arrived after the Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley’s reorganisation of the NHS in England and Robert Francis’s report into the Mid Staffordshire NHS trust care scandal. The NHS was also struggling with the coalition government’s austerity funding, which gave it far smaller budget increases than before.
The plan sought to refocus the NHS to help it cope with the needs of the ageing population. It outlined plans for 50 sites that would test “new models of care”, based on different types of services – like GP surgeries, hospitals and social care – working together.
It also said a “radical upgrade” in preventive health and public health measures was needed to stem a rising tide of illness.
However, a recent Health Foundation analysis found the plan’s “impact was mixed and spreading new models of care proved challenging”.
“Indeed, better integration of health and social care services has been a consistent and elusive objective of NHS plans since at least the 1970s,” it said.
2019: Then prime minister Theresa May and Stevens published the NHS long-term plan.
Like Wednesday’s document, it was intended to lead to dramatic changes over the next decade in the way the NHS works.
It emerged as the NHS was starting to come under pressure, as staff shortages and delays for all sorts of care – in A&E, at GP practices and for hospital treatment – became a major political problem.
It set out changes the service would make in return for the multibillion-pound injection of extra funding May had promised the year before in the run-up to its 70th birthday in July 2018.
It included plans to bolster out-of-hospital care, reduce waiting times, “more NHS action on prevention” and enhanced use of technology.
The long history of NHS reform plans shows that headline-grabbing changes ministers pledge do not always follow and, when they do, they can be slow, patchy and invisible to patients.