This year Britain's National Health
Service celebrates its 70th birthday.
Formed in 1948, it was the first state
health service in the world.
Today, the modern NHS is almost unrecognizable
from the one that was created 70 years ago.
It's the world's fifth biggest employer
with a budget of 110 billion pounds a year.
But it's in urgent need of treatment.
Like many healthcare systems, the NHS is faced
with a funding shortfall and critical staff shortages
meaning its future looks perilous.
Lord Ara Darzi is one of the world's top surgeons
and a former British Health Minister.
He's been on the healthcare frontline for three decades.
And he's come up with a plan for reviving the NHS.
These are my talking points.
The government needs to transform the NHS from
a sickness service to a health and wellbeing service.
Most of the chronic disease is related to human behavior.
The NHS spends almost nine billion pounds
a year dealing with diseases related to smoking
and the growing obesity epidemic.
To cut costs, the government needs to tackle
this public health crisis at its root.
We do this in three ways.
One, regulation, banning smoking was
a wonderful example of that.
Second, taxation.
Introducing sugar tax, or a levy on alcohol.
Thirdly, behavioral intervention.
How do we help people make the right choices?
We need to embrace innovation whether that is digital
which has transformed every aspect of our life,
we need to do the same in health.
The NHS is still running on paper and fax.
We need to move from that archaic times
into the new times of digital.
The NHS is the world's largest purchaser
of fax machines and in some hospitals,
medical equipment is no longer fit for purpose.
A recent report found that machines from the 1980s
were still in use in NHS hospitals.
We need to decommission the old stuff
and save money to pay for the new innovations.
Robotics, new drugs, new interventions.
We need to look at frugal innovations,
technologies that are exceptionally cheap
but at the same time delivering as good an outcome
from a patient's perspective.
In the 21st century, data is the energy
or the fuel of transformation.
Anything you could measure you can improve
and data is one of the ways of doing that.
One million people use the NHS every 36 hours.
But there's no centralized system where doctors
can access their medical data.
Most patients seeing me expect me to have
all the data from their general practice.
We need to drive this integration between
primary care, hospital, and back into the community.
You can actually predict disease before you see
the manifestation of disease by segmenting the population
and identifying those at great risk.
To do this, the NHS will have to tackle
fears over personal data being shared.
Sharing data is critical from a patient's perspective.
And we need to win the confidence of the public when it
comes to the privacy and security aspect of data sharing.
The NHS is facing a funding gap.
By 2020, it's estimated to be 20 billion pounds short.
A lot of people out there think investing in healthcare
is in a bottomless pit.
I could confidently tell you, not just my work,
look at the work of the Lancet Commission,
the World Innovation Summit for Healthcare,
the best return on investment any country
could make is in health.
Healthy nation means a productive nation.
Healthy nation means economic growth.
For every pound you spend in health,
you get two pounds back.
Quality should be the organizing principle
of any health system.
It's a wonderful future if we embrace it.