Agencies/London
British prime minister David Cameron kicked off his re-election campaign yesterday for May’s tight poll by echoing his main rival with a new promise to improve the state-run National Health Service (NHS).
Cameron’s centre-right Conservatives are neck-and-neck in opinion polls with the main opposition centre-left Labour, led by Ed Miliband, who says May 7’s vote will be the tightest for a generation.
In a rallying call to activists at his Conservative party’s spring conference in Manchester, northwest England, Cameron vowed to deliver a “truly seven-day NHS” providing a service as easy to access in the evenings and at weekends as on weekdays.
Polling by Ipsos MORI indicates that the NHS, which provides across-the-board care for Britons and is mostly free, is the most important issue for voters.
“For years it’s been too hard to access the NHS out of hours. But illness doesn’t respect working hours,” Cameron said in a speech 40 days before the election.
“The truth is that you are more likely to die if you turn up at the hospital at the weekend.”
He added: “With a future Conservative government, we would have a truly seven-day NHS.”
The British Medical Association, the trade union for doctors, warned that the NHS was already at “breaking point” and that Cameron had not outlined how he would fund the plan.
Miliband kicked off Labour’s campaign Friday by pledging to protect the NHS from what he claims is creeping privatisation under Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
He promised a new 5% cap on profits for private companies which take on NHS contracts worth over £500,000 and vowed to spend £2.5bn more than the Conservatives on the health service.
All parties have been electioneering since the start of the year but the campaign proper only got under way after parliament shut up shop on Thursday.
While the NHS is a key election issue, the Conservatives’ main focus is on the economy, which has emerged from recession into growth under the coalition as Britain’s deficit has been halved.
Cameron is proposing as part of Conservative plans, hospitals across England will offer consultant-level services seven days a week by the end of the parliament in 2020.
The changes will start with emergency and urgent care services together with supporting services, such as diagnostics.
The Tories said that the changes would build on their commitment to ensure patients can access GP surgeries seven days a week, between 8am and 8pm.
A commitment to a seven-day health service is included in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View, published last October, which said hospital patients should have access to seven day services “where this makes a clinical difference to outcomes”.
Cameron said: “Already millions more people can see a GP seven days a week, but by 2020 I want this for everyone with hospitals properly staffed, especially for urgent and emergency care, so that everyone will have access to the NHS services they need seven days a week by 2020 - the first country in the world to make this happen.”
For Labour, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said the Conservatives’ plans lacked credibility.
“At the last election, David Cameron promised seven-day NHS services in his manifesto. Five years on, he’s making the same promise again,” he said.
“Not only has he failed to deliver on that promise, he made it harder for people to get a GP appointment from Monday to Friday. It is typical of the brass neck of a man who thinks he can take the public for mugs.
“With the NHS in increasing financial distress, David Cameron must set out clearly how it will be paid for. His extreme plans for spending cuts will mean they won’t be able to protect the NHS.”
The British Medical Association (BMA) warned that the Conservatives had not even committed the funds needed to maintain existing services, and accused the party of “shameless political game playing”.
“The £2bn extra funding that has been pledged falls far short of what is needed to deliver existing services, let alone fund additional care,” said BMA council chair, Dr Mark Porter.
“With existing services stretched to breaking point, a majority of hospitals facing crippling budget deficits and frontline staff under extreme pressure, the NHS needs far more than just words to deliver extra care.
“Without a detailed, fully-costed plan to provide the staff and resources needed to deliver more seven-day services, this is at best an empty pledge and at worst shameless political game playing with the NHS ahead of the election.”
Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, listens during his keynote speech at the party’s spring forum in Manchester, northern Eng
