Carl Heneghan

To be able to make these decisions, you have to be incredibly informed, understand the context of clinical practice, the evidence, and what the values of society, and bring all that together.

Therefore, I think we should just completely take healthcare...

and the decision-making outside of politicians.

Politicians' role should be to decide how much money should be made available, should be to talk about the laws and the regulations, like clinical trials regulation, device legislation, and bring that together.

But actually what we now need is a bit like the Bank of England, is independence within healthcare.

And we need a head of the Bank of Healthcare.

I am available for this role.

But that would require much more thoughtful use of the funds and divert them where we're supposed to get the most benefit and the most value for our use.

And use the resources efficiently and effectively and not use them in a political way that says we're just going to spend more money on X or Y.

Yeah, or we're going to put buses in a car park and screen everybody for lung cancer and it looks politically motivated.

Health checks.

So in this new bank of the NHS, you're going to end up with possibly a number of wise people who are going to come together and explain why we're going to do something and

and explain on an evidence base and what we've just discussed today is that a classic example of that like the routine ultrasound scanning and sometimes it might go we're not going to do that we're going to do a step wedge trial and we're going to inform the NIHR to fund this because we want the answer and when we get the answer we'll rule on it and remove it from politics and if we did that

We could revolutionise our approach to healthcare, and the politicians could get back to thinking about how much money is needed, what regulations are required, and remove themselves from the politicisation.

think that was another rant that's two rants or kind of a suggestion i'm feeling ranty because it's winter's coming and it's getting dark and i'm sort of like trying to gear myself up for christmas maybe in november so i'm feeling a bit more ranty a warming we should return to more nitty-gritty clinical matters

Well, it's really interesting.

A colleague of mine, Mark Porter, who does Inside Health at Radio 4, unfortunately has stepped down and retired and gone back to general practice.

But he signed off his program with saying, I started 10 years ago talking about hypertensives and nighttime blood pressure.

And now I'm finishing the program with the same issue.

And I think what is a really interesting issue is this seems to me a really important effect.