Leadership Quote by Patricia Hewitt

“Completely focussed” is doing a lot of political work here. Hewitt’s line borrows the language of consumer service - users, needs, focus - to smuggle in a reform agenda that sounds both obvious and morally unassailable. Who, after all, would argue for a system that isn’t centered on the people it serves? That’s the intent: to frame structural change as simple common sense, and to make dissent feel like indifference.

The subtext is sharper. In British health and social care, “modern” is rarely a neutral adjective; it signals a break with legacy institutions, professional gatekeeping, and bureaucratic routines that prioritize providers, targets, or budgets over lived experience. “Users” is a deliberate choice, too. It sidesteps the warmer language of “patients” or “citizens” and replaces it with a term that implies agency, choice, and measurable satisfaction. That linguistic shift aligns with the New Labour-era instinct to import managerial logics into public services: performance indicators, responsiveness, personalization, and sometimes competition. The promise is dignity and convenience; the risk is reducing care to a set of transactions.

Context matters because health and social care are famously complex systems with multiple “users” whose needs can conflict: the patient, the caregiver, the clinician, the taxpayer, the local authority. “Completely” flattens those trade-offs, but rhetorically it’s effective precisely because it refuses to negotiate. It casts the existing system as misaligned by default, and positions reformers as the only adults in the room: pragmatic, compassionate, future-facing. In one sentence, Hewitt turns governance into customer care - and invites you to judge the whole state by the quality of the service.