Leadership Quote by Patricia Hewitt

Hewitt’s line does two jobs at once: it humanizes a vast bureaucracy and pre-emptively launders “reforms” in the language of decency. By reminding us that NHS and social care staff are “also themselves patients and users,” she collapses the usual them-versus-us divide that haunts public-service politics. The clever move is that it frames frontline workers not as a cost center or a workforce to be managed, but as stakeholders who would never consent to a system that mistreats people. If they’d hate it for their own parents, the argument goes, they won’t inflict it on yours.

That’s the intent. The subtext is defensive. “Reform” in the NHS rarely arrives unscarred: it can mean efficiency drives, targets, restructuring, private-sector involvement, new commissioning regimes. Those policies routinely trigger suspicion that compassion will be traded for spreadsheets. Hewitt anticipates that backlash by anchoring her reforms to an ethical baseline: the “way they and their families would want to be treated.” It’s an appeal to the everyday moral logic of care, more powerful than any white paper, because it speaks to how people actually judge health systems: not by procurement models, but by whether dignity survives the waiting room.

There’s also a subtle burden-shift. If staff “all want” this kind of treatment, then resistance to reform can be cast as misunderstanding, obstruction, or cynicism rather than a legitimate critique of policy design. The rhetoric wraps managerial change in a shared identity - patient, worker, family - betting that the NHS’s deepest political asset remains trust, and that trust can be borrowed to finance disruption.