Andrew Lansley Quotes
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I was shadow health secretary for six years, and the beauty of being in opposition - if there is any beauty - is that you tend to get a pretty unvarnished view because no one bothers to paint the coal white before you turn up.
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Go to any hospital, you'll find wards that are run by senior nurses with matrons. The point is do they have the power, do they have the responsibility inside the hospital?
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If I'm serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can't have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need.
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I want to make it clear that the lobbying sector does an important job. It is very useful to the government to hear the views of a broad range of groups to make sure we get the best.
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I'm not going to go mystery shopping in the NHS because we have a million people every day using it and rating its facilities.
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The job of the government - and my responsibility - is to help people live healthier lives. The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve the public's health and reduce health inequalities, long-term, from cradle to grave.
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I became a Conservative in the late 1980s because I could see that the Conservative party had transformed Britain's economy and our standing in the world compared to Labour in the 1980s.
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You don't come into government thinking it is going to be easy.
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If, like me, nothing is more important to you than our children's future, then their opportunities must be protected.
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I am not saying do not give people equal health services but do not pretend that giving more money for diabetes or chronic diseases means you are going to deal with the origins of health inequalities.
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The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.
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You can't simply slash the sugar in food; otherwise, people simply won't accept it.
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In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.
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We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.
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We have to treat smoking as a major public health issue. We have to reduce the extent to which young people start smoking, and one of the issues is the extent to which display of cigarettes and brands does draw young people into smoking in the first place.
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I didn't go into politics because I wanted to win a popularity contest.
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Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down.
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I have spent too long with too many people who have lost loved ones to healthcare-associated infections not to be determined to act on this. There is no tolerable level of preventable infections. The only acceptable strategy is a zero-tolerance strategy.
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The Transparency Bill is something we should all support - practical steps in promoting an open and accountable democracy.
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Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.
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I think we have to understand that sugar is an essential component of food; it's just that sugar in excess is an inappropriate and unhelpful diet.
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We must aim for a zero-tolerance approach to hospital-acquired infections; we have to be clear about who's in charge at ward level, so there's proper accountability, and we need to reduce the reliance on agency nursing staff.
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If, over time, patients don't go to some services, then progressively they become less viable, so you do arrive at a point where the conclusion is: 'These are the right services for the future, and this is capacity we don't need.'
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You all know my commitment to the National Health Service. While I am Secretary of State, the NHS will never be fragmented, privatised or undermined. I am personally committed to an NHS which gives equal access, and excellent care.