Being cautious does not mean not changing things.

But for any change you have to take the key people with you.

For people who come into contact with the National Health Service or social care, the services are currently too bitty. It’s quite difficult to navigate your way through them.

There are further structural problems with how the service is organised for the NHS.

Ideally, there should be a consensus amongst members of political parties in doing something about the private finance initiative, or moving towards abolition of the purchaser-provider split?

Also, if ‘reconfigurations’ of NHS entities are deemed necessary, great thought should be put into the best clinically-driven as well as health economy method of doing so, involving meaningful engagement with persons and patients.

GPs, the backbone of the NHS, who are essential in providing a ‘proactive’ service for both health and illness, should not have their attention diverted into political attacks denigrating their value or into wondering whether their practices will have to shut.

With the default option now competitive tendering, this has generated a need for people who are savvy at making pitches and knowing the law. This is clearly a push of resources away from frontline care, the deliverers of which are expected to do ‘more for less’.

A brave Government will therefore have to organise better communication between the health and social care systems, and the person or patient.

It will also have to make technical adjustments to the law which currently puts competition law above clinical need (see for example the issue of mergers.)

Previous Governments in England have been great ‘reformers’, for example the Gladstone tenure.

Indeed, this Coalition inflicted a 493 page Act of parliament which had three aims: turbo boost a market, turbo boost getting rid of financially distressed hospitals, and pumping resources into an economic regulator.

This Act of parliament, accompanied by a £2 bn ‘reorganisation’, had nothing to do with patient safety. Indeed, the only clause in the Act acts to abolish the National Patient Safety Agency.

The new Government will have to be brave about funding.

For a Government of socialist flavour, this will mean avoiding at all costs compulsory personal budgets which are the shoo-horn for neoliberalism; and avoiding co-payments, which end up being a tax on the ill.

The focus of the new Government should be offering a pleasurable experience for any person using health and social care services, such that each member of the public is treated as an unique individual.

That individual is not merely a ‘collection of problems’, but has a past, present, and future, and interacts with his or her own social networks, community and environment.

The discussion to be had will at stage have to be a serious one, and there will be a need to engage the mainstream media in such a way that they evidently have had enthusiasm for (over Douglas Caswell, UKIP or Nigel Farage).

So the next Government is likely to introduce integrated or whole person care, but this should be clinically driven. Serious thought should be making each pound of healthcare spending go as far as possible, but ultimately there should be an acknowledgement that you get what you pay for.

And furthermore an ‘unsustainable’ NHS does not merely mean a NHS you wish to starve of adequate funds.

The NHS and social care systems do contain outstanding, hardworking professionals, and with the correct leadership the NHS can continue to be the ‘envy of the world’.

Hundreds of thousands of people are marching to London for September 6th to show just that.