Gordon Brown has made it clear that one of his priorities is health. His acceptance speech at the Labour conference last Sunday also made it very clear that it will not be business as before with change being emphasised time and time again.
Is it just spin or is there a genuine desire to do better? He of all people must be aware that the billions of pounds of extra funding thrown at the NHS has not produced the desired results. There is little doubt that some areas have improved, but it is also clear that this has been at the cost of others with much of the funding lost to constant re-organisations and increased management.
Massive overspends have resulted in clinical staff and training cutbacks with training budgets cut at no notice, causing financial problems to universities. Brown often reminds us that New Labour ended Britain's stop-go economy, but can the same be said of the NHS? It might be hoped that for one who has had the misfortune to lose the vision in one eye and, if media reports are to be believed, is concerned about his other eye, Brown would show some sympathy towards the preservation of vision.
This sympathy seems to be lacking at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence whose recent consultation on the treatment of neovascular AMD suggested that Lucentis and Macugen should only be available for use on the NHS in England when useful vision has been lost in one eye. This is in sharp contrast to Brown's home country where the Scottish Medicines Consortium has recommended their use. There can be few who would fail to question this policy as being incredibly callous and takes little account of the risks of patients becoming totally blind and a greater drain on social services resources than the cost of earlier treatment.
Equally inexplicable is the suggestion from the Oxford Eye Hospital Scheme that the campaign to reduce waiting times for cataract surgery has gone too far and the NHS is spending too much on the operations. This claim by ophthalmologists could, of course, have nothing to do with the fact that their private work has been hit hard by the NHS catch up! The suggestion that GPs should apply a national standard to restrict access to cataract surgery smacks of the government's arbitrary approach to medicine with little regard to patients' needs.
One Hertfordshire PCT is telling its GPs that it will not consider anybody for cataract extraction with a visual acuity of 6/12 or better this will certainly put younger sufferers at risk of being unable to drive. Needless to say, optometrists, who are responsible for the majority of primary care cataract referrals, were not informed and probably not consulted.