Wes the puppet-master – Patient and public voice in The Ten Year Plan and Dash Review (14 July 2025)

Summary

Taken together, the NHS Ten Year Plan and The Dash Review have served, almost fatally, to destroy patient power. Almost.

Wes Streeting describes intermediary organisations that channel and amplify patient and public voices so as to provide parity in decision-making, as ‘ventriloquists’. Meanwhile, he boasts that the £3m pounds spent on carefully choreographed consultation events for the Plan is the biggest show of patient and public voice in NHS history. Oh irony.

But let’s not be diverted by Wes’s deeply insulting tone. Nor even by the abolition of HealthWatch and the scrapping of just over 50 years of independent statutory voice. 

Clenton Farquhason, a renowned activist, states: ‘When you remove the structures that elevate lived experience, you don’t just cut costs you cut the cord between voice and justice. And when that happens, people don’t feel safer.
They retreat.
They disconnect. They stop telling the truth because what’s the point?’

However, darker forces are at play, writes David Gilbert in this article.

Related reading on the hub:

• Review of patient safety across the health and care landscape: Patient Safety Learning's response
• 10 Year Health Plan: Patient Safety Learning’s initial reflections