December 28, 2021 - 9:02am

Another day, another attempt by Jeremy Hunt to position himself as the leading national expert on the NHS. Ever since his leadership bid in 2019, during which he sold himself as “the first prime minister to have run our biggest public service, the NHS”, Hunt has sought to capitalise on his tenure as healthcare secretary.

Rarely missing an opportunity to list the issues facing the embattled health service, Hunt popped up on Christmas Day with a column in the Telegraph: “Voters won’t be pleased if their NHS tax hike is wasted: The Prime Minister must grapple with long-term reform of the health service”. Hunt briefly touches on the fact that he was health secretary, an experience from which he has apparently “learned many lessons”. He glosses over the fact that he was actually the longest serving health secretary in British history. Being at the helm from 2012-2018, Hunt had an unparalleled opportunity to reshape and improve the health service. Yet he neglected to do so.

In parliament, Hunt chairs the Health and Social Care Select Committee, a body meant to analyse the shortcomings in the healthcare system that he presided over for six years. As arguably one of the people most responsible for the state the NHS found itself in on the eve of the pandemic, it seems jarring that he is the lead critic of its Covid response.

He oversaw record numbers of cancelled operations, such as in winter 2017, when a staggering 62,000 surgeries were cancelled, and presided over the first Junior Doctor’s Strike in 40 years; his plans for changes to contracts at the time were described by the Public Accounts Committee as “seriously flawed” with “no coherent attempts” to understand staffing. Indeed, the Health and Social Care Select committee found at the time that he had “broken his pledges on NHS funding and… [mislead] the public about health service reforms”. He was even found to have acted unlawfully by trying to downgrade maternity & A&E departments. Hardly a flawless record.

In the Telegraph, he argues for increasing both the number of doctors trained and GPs employed, and decreasing the obsession with national targets. Once again, Hunt seems to forget his own role in all of this. As far back as 2015, he promised an additional 5000 GPs in the NHS by 2020. But, in the six years he was health secretary, he managed to employ a mere 162. He still does not fully understood staffing, getting even basic facts wrong, like stating that it takes “seven years to train a doctor”, when a 30 second Google would show that the vast majority of medical degrees take five years.

Perhaps it should be unsurprising that, after presiding over a multitude of broken targets, Hunt isn’t too fond of them. When Hunt started as health secretary 94.9% of patients were admitted, transferred or discharged from A&E within 4 hours, close to the target of 95%, when he left, 6 years later, it was down to 84%. In 2012, 87.3% of patients with cancer started treatment within 2 months of referral (the target is 85%), by the time he left, it had fallen to 78.3%.

As a doctor working in the NHS, it’s hard to watch Mr Hunt play the part of wise public service guru, when his own time as Health Secretary was a cautionary tale.

Amy Jones is an anonymous medical doctor with a background in philosophy and bioethics. You can find her on Twitter at @skepticalzebra.


Amy Jones is an anonymous doctor who has a background in Philosophy & Bioethics.