Good luck to James Murray as he takes the helm as health secretary. It must feel like boarding the Titanic having seen the movie. The genial new health secretary seems the type to steer prudently around obstacles well ahead of time, but upon boarding HMS NHS he whacked it straight into a BMA-shaped iceberg.
Truly there is nothing like life on a sinking ship to test the mettle of a man. Waving from the nearest lifeboat is Wes Streeting, currently busy covering himself in something other than glory, despite some compelling pre-fight trash talk ahead of taking the job as health sec. He was going to save community pharmacy and duff up the BMA.
Ultimately he found the post no less bruising than those who came before him, including Nye Bevan, who fought the BMA to establish the NHS in the first place.
By 2026 it feels impossible to overestimate the escalating size of the task Murray has accepted. Streeting’s handover note will be brutal even without the BMA dancing in the red corner. Maternity care, the DH-NHSE merger, the workforce, cancer, the rotating rudder on the 10-year plan, Palantir, dentistry, social care, mental health, corridor care, future pandemic preparedness, resident doctors, A&E, waiting lists…
And community pharmacy.
Kidding
At least the contract dropped. Read all about it.
Leaving the obvious penury to one side, the commitment to an agenda of reform by the government is where things get interesting going forward. Clearly CPE feels it has gone out on a limb. It’s trusting this agenda has strength.
C+D looks forward to poring over it. The ambitions, the times, the dates, the funds, laid out in the sort of detail we’ve come to expect from this government at no point since it was elected. Will it appear?
What will it look like? Will it work? CPE CEO Janet Morrison gave an update yesterday as to where the agenda is at.
Still, where community pharmacy will enter Murray’s new to-do list is hard to say, let’s hope it battles to the top before another reshuffle shuffles the mood of the country again. They weren’t kidding when they warned about society getting overheated in the summer. Welcome to June.
Murray is nothing if not a thoughtful and patient man who has direct experience of the transformative effect that a funded and deployed community pharmacy can bring to local health. He knows, because he fought for it.
If he has time to get to grips with things, he might be the health secretary community pharmacy has been waiting for. If…
