“Nothing says more about the state of a nation than the wellbeing of its children. So right at the core of our mission will be a bold new ambition to raise the healthiest generation of children in our history.”
Labour Manifesto 2024
The Labour Party Manifesto was published on 13 June 2024, signalling an intent to prioritise children’s health in Government. However, there is not much detail available at this stage on the role that children’s hospitals will be asked to play in achieving this vision – or how this will benefit children who need access to acute and specialist care.
Most of the explicit commitments around children in the Manifesto are around education, inequalities or poverty, for example, expanding childcare provision, recruiting more teachers and introducing free breakfast clubs in every primary school.
The NHS-related commitments related to children largely relate to public health, mental health and primary care, for example:
- Recruiting an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults
- Action on sales of cigarettes, marketing of vapes and advertising of junk food to children
- A supervised tooth-brushing scheme for 3- to 5-year-olds
- Digitising the Red Book for children
- Enabling vaccinations for babies and children as part of health visits
- Implementing the recommendations of the Cass Review.
In addition, the main commitments around the acute sector do not reference child health specifically. These include:
- Delivering 18 weeks via: 2m more appointments, scans, operations per year; incentivising out of hours; pooling neighbouring hospital resources
- Delivering the NHS Workforce Plan
- Early diagnosis; doubling the no. of MRI & CT scanners; new tech & AI
- Commitment to the New Hospitals Programme
- Life sciences plan: NHS innovation & adoption strategy; leading the world in clinical trials; speed up procurement and adoption of innovation
The CHA welcomes this long overdue national focus on children’s health and wellbeing. We look forward to working with the Labour Party and our wider network of policy and political colleagues to help play our part in making sure the rhetoric becomes a reality.
As a community of child health experts, we continue to advocate for a national child health action plan that addresses gaps across the whole patient pathway from primary to tertiary care, with protected funding for children’s services, underpinned by our vision to create the most caring and most innovative child health service in the world.