Wales Green Party

Health

Restoring national health.

Compassion in healthcare and the prevention of illness should be at the forefront of our healthcare service.

We would:

  • Defend Aneurin Bevan’s vision for a free and publicly owned NHS, and prevent services being controlled by privately owned companies.
  • In Scotland, free social care is provided for the elderly. We would investigate how a similar scheme could be introduced in Wales.
  • Decentralise healthcare responsibility to local government, ensure that minimum service levels and national guidelines are provided to prevent a postcode lottery, and oppose further health service centralisation.
  • Keep the health service free – maintain free prescriptions, reintroduce free eye tests and NHS dental treatment for all, and ensure NHS chiropody is widely available.
  • Oppose a two-tier health service. The quality of your care should not depend on the depth of your pocket.
  • Treat patients with dignity. Patients have both rights and responsibilities – they are not customers who can come and go. Their dignity should be recognised, but they should also treat NHS staff with respect.
  • Provide the right to an assisted death within a rigorous framework of regulation, and in the context of the availability of the highest level of palliative care.
  • Make available on the NHS complementary medicines that are cost-effective and have been shown to work. More NHS dental care rather than the mass fluoridation of drinking water.

    • Prevention is better than cure …… and part of prevention is greater equality

    The Green Party believes in a much stronger emphasis on prevention of ill health, by living healthier lives and encouraging greater equality. This shows how, unlike other parties, our policies are woven together into a coherent whole. Better health is not simply a matter of ever-increasing spending on the NHS.

    We cannot have an effective preventive approach or a long-term plan for health improvement, unless we encourage healthier eating, more exercise, a lower-stress, slower-living society, a serious reduction in environmental pollutants, and greater access to tranquil countryside. And we recognise the connection between mental and physical well-being.

    Making our society more equal will improve our health, without spending a penny extra on the NHS. Life expectancy, infant mortality, low birth-weight and self-rated health are worse in more unequal societies. Mental illness and drug addiction are much more common in more unequal countries. Obesity is less of a problem in more equal societies like Japan and worst in the most unequal ones like the US.