Leadership Quote by Patricia Hewitt

Patricia Hewitt’s line flatters the public while quietly reassigning responsibility. By pairing “patients” with “consumers,” she smuggles in a market logic: health care is not just something you receive in vulnerability, it’s something you navigate, compare, and in some sense manage. The compliment - “better informed” than any previous generation - reads like empowerment, but it also functions as a policy pre-empt: if people are informed, then reforms that emphasize choice, transparency, and personal decision-making can be framed as common sense rather than cost-control or structural change.

The subtext is a reframing of citizenship into customerhood. “Better informed” sounds democratic, even egalitarian, yet it glosses over who gets informed and how. Information is not evenly distributed; it tracks education, time, language, and digital access. A generation may be “better informed” on average while still leaving the sickest and poorest navigating a maze. The line also hints at a cultural shift in authority: clinicians are no longer the sole gatekeepers of knowledge, and the state can position itself as an enabler of informed choices rather than the guarantor of outcomes.

Context matters because Hewitt is speaking as a politician in an era of rising patient advocacy, internet health information, and public pressure for accountability in large systems like the NHS. The rhetoric works because it feels optimistic and modern, while subtly normalizing a healthcare world where being informed is treated as a civic duty - and where failures can be narrated as failures of navigation, not just failures of policy.