Andy Burnham reveals Labour's 'Whole-Person' vision on health and care

In a speech being made today to think-tank the King’s Fund, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham is setting out the Labour Party’s ‘One Nation’ approach to health and care in the twenty-first century.

Key to Labour’s vision is the complete integration of health and social care services, which the shadow minister terms ‘Whole-Person Care’, designed to “co-ordinate all of one person’s needs: physical, mental and social” into one budget, with NHS services taking a central role.

An excerpt from Mr Burnham’s speech highlights why the opposition party feel this change is needed, saying: “On a practical level, families are looking for things from the current system that it just isn’t able to provide.

“They desperately want co-ordination of care – a single point of contact for all of mum or dad’s needs – but it’s unlikely to be on offer in a three-service world.

“So people continue to face the frustration of telling the same story over again to all of the different council and NHS professionals who come through the door.

“Carers get ground down by the battle to get support, spending days on the phone being passed from pillar to post.”

Mr Burnham continues: “So the question I am today putting at the heart of Labour’s policy review is this: is it time for the full integration of health and social care?

“A service that starts with what people want – to stay comfortable at home – and is built around them.

“When you start to think of a one-budget, one-service world, all kinds of new possibilities open up.

“If the NHS was commissioned to provide Whole-Person Care in all settings – physical, mental, social from home to hospital – a decisive shift can be made towards prevention.

“A year-of-care approach to funding, for instance, would finally put the financial incentives where they need to be.”

The speech suggests that any remaining efforts to pursue an all-party consensus on care-related issues are now at an end, with the shadow minister describing the new approach as the “first articulation of a coherent and genuine alternative to the current Government’s direction.”

He continues: “It is the product both of careful reflection on Labour’s time in government and a response to what has happened since.

“Everything I say today is based on two unshakable assumptions.

“First, that the health and care we want will need to be delivered in a tighter fiscal climate for the foreseeable future, so we have to think even more fundamentally about getting better results for people and families from what we already have.

“Second, our fragile NHS has no capacity for further top-down reorganisation, having been ground down by the current round. I know that any changes must be delivered through the organisations and structures we inherit in 2015.”

King’s Fund chief executive Chris Ham issued a statement welcoming new ideas, but judging the overall vision to be, as yet, incomplete, saying: “Andy Burnham's diagnosis of why the NHS and social care needs to change is the right one. The demands of an ageing population, changing burden of disease and rising patient expectations mean that fundamental change is needed.

“His prescription for change is ambitious and his vision of delivering integrated care, co-ordinated around the needs of the individual, will be widely welcomed. But it leaves a number of unanswered questions, not least how plans as radical as these could be implemented while keeping his promise not to embark on further structural change.

“We have argued that it is time to think differently about how to respond to the future challenges facing the NHS and social care. Andy Burnham has responded to the challenge to think differently, but the ideas he has articulated today leave many questions unanswered.”