---

Access to NHS Services

I beg to move, To leave out from ““House”” to end and add:"““supports the Government’s trebling of investment in the NHS by 2008 and welcomes the recent confirmation of an extra £8 billion for 2007-08; congratulates the staff and the medical professions for their hard work and commitment in helping progress towards this Government’s historic maximum 18 week wait from GP referral to treatment; welcomes the extra choice available to patients with new services more convenient for their lives including around 90 NHS walk-in centres and the £750 million programme for developing community facilities providing care closer to home; recognises the achievement of the NHS in delivering a wide range of quality personal services convenient for patients including NHS Direct, 23 new independent sector treatment centres increasing choice; further welcomes the 280,000 extra staff working for the NHS since 1997 including 80,000 more nurses and 35,000 more doctors; further welcomes the fact that over 85 per cent. of all GP practices have used Choose and Book to refer their patients to hospital and that over three million Choose and Book appointments have been made so far, allowing patients to choose appointments that are at convenient times to fit in with their lives; and recognises the need to ensure that the views of NHS staff and patients are paramount and that Government must engage fully in a dialogue with them about the future of the NHS.””." I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) for welcoming me to the Dispatch Box and for the copy of the Conservative party document. I have had my attention drawn to many documents that could profoundly influence the NHS, but this was not among them. I will have a look at it in good time. I pay tribute to my predecessor. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt) is a woman of great courage, great intelligence and great ability—more courage, intelligence and ability than the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) possesses in his little finger, incidentally. I pay tribute to her for the tremendous work that she has done in my Department. I have been in post for the equivalent of only 10 minutes, I suppose, but my party has been in government for 10 years, so perhaps the best way to open my speech is to look back briefly at the health service that we inherited in 1997. The service was starved of essential funding; indeed, we were investing as a proportion of our GDP at about the level of the Czech Republic and Poland and well below the level of France, Germany and Sweden. Every winter heralded a new crisis, waiting lists topped 1 million and the chronic bed shortage meant that elderly patients were turfed out in the middle of night while critically ill children were denied essential intensive care. All that has changed. In 1997, patients were left on trolleys in accident and emergency departments for hours, or even days, waiting for admission. Now nearly 98 per cent. of patients are either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arrival. In March 1997, 284,000 patients had been on a waiting list for an operation for more than six months. Today, that figure is less than 500. In 1997, half of all NHS hospital buildings had been built before the NHS was created. Now, thanks to the biggest hospital building programme ever seen in this country, it is less than a fifth. Ten years on, the position has been transformed thanks to greater investment, difficult but necessary system reform and, above all, the tremendous work of those who work for the NHS. We have trebled the health budget and there are now almost 80,000 more nurses and more than 36,000 more doctors. Cancer death rates are down by 15.7 per cent., saving more than 50,000 lives. Death rates from heart disease are down by 35.9 per cent., saving nearly 150,000 lives. Since 2000, 231 new CT scanners and 158 new MRI scanners have been installed in hospitals.