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Health and Education

We are bringing more independent providers into the national health service—I shall say something about education in a few moments. In the NHS, we are commissioning more treatment from private and independent providers to raise capacity in the service so that we can cut waiting times and continue to raise the rate of innovation in the NHS, thus ensuring that patients have more choice and more control over the treatment and care they receive. Last week, just five years through the 10-year programme of investment and reform in the NHS, we published the latest NHS annual report. The achievements it describes are remarkable. To take just one example, the waiting time for heart bypass operations is now within three months, compared with a two-year wait before 1997. Cataract patients, too, are operated on within three months; there used to be a 15-month wait. We achieved those maximum waiting times four years earlier than the promise we made in the NHS plan. Ninety-eight per cent. of accident and emergency patients are seen and treated or admitted within four hours. One million more patients are being treated in the NHS each year, and as a result deaths from lung cancer among British men and from breast cancer among British women are falling faster than anywhere else in the world.Many people said that those things could not be done, but they are being done.