NHS (60th Anniversary)

The public will be bemused by all this discussion about outcomes. They want to get through A and E in a reasonable time. They want not to wait years for an operation. Samia al Qadhi, chief executive of Breast Cancer Care, said this morning that targets had their uses. She certainly thinks that it is important that there are targets for the timing of cancer care in particular, not only because of the emotional distress of waiting for a diagnosis or for information, which should certainly not be underestimated as it is considerable, but because there is plenty of evidence that early diagnosis saves lives with breast cancer and other cancers. So there was no support there for this weird argument that we concentrate just on outcomes and there is no place for targets at all.