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Gordon Brown will inherit a market-driven NHS that has gone full circle under Tony Blair
The day before Labour won the 1997 general election, Tony Blair famously said there were 24 hours left to save the NHS. Now, as he prepares to leave office, he can look back on the ten years he has had to save the health service.
No one could accuse Mr Blair of neglecting it. Funding has more than doubled, and a brief look at the changes on his watch shows a breathtaking range of initiatives, strategies, policies and reorganisations (see box).
Unison head of health Karen Jennings is in no doubt that the NHS has improved, largely as a result of the record investment But she says things started to go wrong after an ideological shift that saw the private sector starting to provide core NHS services. 'There has been an unravelling of the good work that has been done because of this. The NHS was improving radically until 2005.'
Former RCN general secretary Christine Hancock says Mr Blair's...