The NHS reels from crisis to crisis, with a waiting list of seven million and chronic workforce shortages. Why is it so hard to change a service that clearly isn’t working? David Haslam, a former GP who has chaired NICE and the BMA and is the author of Side Effects, tells Ros Taylor that a focus on hospital treatment means that public health and end-of-life care are shamefully neglected.

“It’s almost as if we’ve designed the health service based on the interests of specialists.’
“If you stay with the same GP over many years you have fewer hospital admissions, reduced out of hours care and a lower rate of early death. If that was a drug, we’d have invested in it massively.”
“I find it completely extraordinary that hospices are generally funded as charities. We’d be up in arms if our maternity units were only funded by charity shops.”

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Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Producer and audio editor: Jade Bailey. Producer: Kasia Tomasiewicz. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production.

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