Words matter. These are the best Andrew Lansley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Tell people that biology and the environment cause obesity and they are offered the one thing we have to avoid: an excuse. As it is, people who see more fat people around them may themselves be more likely to gain weight.
We will never privatise the National Health Service.
It is more important to engage the public positively with choice and competition to everyone than to be directed into a benefit for a minority.
Experience in other countries shows how big money, rather than the best political candidate, can influence politics.
I didn’t go into politics because I wanted to win a popularity contest.
The NHS is a national organisation, but it is best delivered locally.
I know that nurses are not only the largest healthcare profession but are responsible for the delivery of most healthcare, and are often in the best place to be able to see the whole pathway of care.
Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there’s a presumption that all information is shared with us.
As a Coalition Government, we inherited a legacy of lack of trust and confidence in political system.
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.
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?
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.
It is in my heart that I believe most strongly that our future is within a reformed E.U. – not least because we now live in a global marketplace.
There’s a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, ‘We give them the service and they are grateful.’ We have to move to shared decision-making.
Underperforming hospitals or units should accept that they have to improve the service they offer or that patients, quite properly, will go elsewhere.
We know, in Wales or in England – you simply can’t trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won’t let them; we’ll always fight for the NHS.
We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.
You can’t simply slash the sugar in food; otherwise, people simply won’t accept it.
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.’
The culture is about moving to a place where tobacco and smoking isn’t part of normal life: people don’t encounter it normally, they don’t see it in their big supermarkets, they don’t see people smoking in public places, they don’t see tobacco vending machines.
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.
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.
The NHS should be proactively using substantial resources across government to intervene and try to deliver positive improvements in people’s standards of living.
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.
You should be able to choose which hospital you go to.
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.
We must not constantly talk about tackling obesity and warning people about the negative consequences of obesity. Instead we must be positive – positive about the fun and benefits to be had from healthy living, trying to get rid of people’s excuses for being obese by tackling the issue in a positive way.
Tackling the environment should not be a licence to lecture people, because they have no excuse not to exercise, or eat their fruit and vegetables. Nannying – at least among adults – is likely to be counterproductive. Providing information is empowering; lecturing people is not. So, no excuses, no nannying.
When you have an election campaign,it has to be simple and something everybody can relate to.
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.
Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.
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.
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.
