It is political party conference season. Having been a local politician until recently, I am the last person to belittle politics.

I also in a nerdy way get a bit excited about the conference season. Not a popular view I know, but I firmly believe in the power of politics if done right, to improve people’s lives.

As you’ll have predicted, there is a but coming…..

The ‘but’ is that the NHS has had a lot of politics ‘done’ to it and it is starting to be harmful. I have seen, in my relatively short career (14 years), four major shake-ups and worked under a primary care organisation that has changed name and size six times. In each re-organisation managers have to spend months changing jobs and being distracted from the real work of improving health services. On top of this, every time there is a problem in the NHS (which given one million patient contacts every 36 hours does sometimes happen), politicians feel the need to ‘do something’. The something is often a knee jerk response.

The current re-organisation has been disruptive and is ‘so big it can be seen from space’, according to the NHS chief executive. In it there are bad ideas and some good ones. This includes the idea to make the day to day running of the NHS separate from politicians.

I think that politicians must be out there talking about what matters in the NHS, setting the budgets, deciding what the voters tell them is important. However, problems arise when minute detail is managed by politicians. Nye Bevan, the health secretary who founded the NHS (and a hero of mine), famously said that ‘if a bedpan drops in a hospital corridor, he wanted to hear it clatter in Whitehall’. This approach may have been reasonable in a less complex system but it is impossible in the 2013 NHS. The current idea is that something called NHS England, an ‘arms length’ body manages the NHS and the government only steps in for the big issues. The advantage of this would be that NHS staff could start to work out how to do what the people and patients wanted (using politicians to make their decisions on their behalf). This would reduce the amount of daft schemes that often distract us from the job of looking after patients.

Unsurprisingly the government hasn’t allowed NHS England to manage the NHS. It still feels the need to step in with daily initiatives.

So back to the party conference season. This is the opportunity for political parties to present big health policy ideas. We should hear a lot about the following: How is the NHS going to provide better services despite budget cuts? How are health and social care services to work together? How are we to provide decent services for a growing number of older people? Do we want to start saying that the health service will restrict certain treatments, or will we spend more money on it?

These are all tricky problems that we need politicians to focus on.

What we don’t need is for them to keep using up valuable energy on checking on every bedpan across the land.