Former RCGP Chair Dame Clare Gerada Critical Of Government's Language About NHS

Former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Dame Clare Gerada, criticised the government for the way ministers speak about the NHS, saying it leaves staff feeling "demoralised".

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Chatting to host Zoë Grünewald on the political programme Politics Uncensored, the Former President of the RCGP said: "The Secretary of State for Health does a wonderful job, and he's got real vision. But I jarred a bit when he said, just before the election that the NHS was broken. I give my all, as my colleagues do, hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and to think that we're working in a broken system makes us feel demoralised and we're demoralised enough with the waiting times and the fact that we can't deliver the care our patients need."

Dame Clare then continued to give her opinion on the state on the NHS: "I don't think it's broken. I think it certainly needs a little bit of love and attention, and it needs, as Keir Starmer says, a real shift in how care is delivered, how funding streams, how we use the premises and how we use data and digital, but I would pull back from saying it's broken."

Also in this episode, Dame Clare spoke about the role of banning smoking in pub gardens and on the pavement outside pubs and restaurants in taking the load off of the NHS: "It's pivotal, and we have to think about prevention as primary, secondary and tertiary prevention. So primary is when you give vaccines to your children or stop people smoking, and tertiary prevention is you stop people getting worse when they have chronic diseases. So, it's absolutely pivotal. And again, to use an example, if you're most people now living with 15 years of ill health, 15 years of requiring repeated hospital appointments, repeated consultations, lots and lots of medicines, we need to reduce that. We need to because we can't stop death, but what we can stop is that enormous length of time that we're living with ill health. And that's about us taking responsibility for our health."