Despite all these achievements, I understand that
there are some pressures on the NHS today, particularly during the winter
months. I have always been clear that the NHS should be free at the point of
need and it is. Spending has also continued to rise. In 2010 when Gordon
Brown left office, spending on the NHS was £97 billion per year. It will
have gone up by over 25 percent by 2019/2020. However, the NHS has also seen a huge increase in demand
for its services. As medical science advances and we live longer, the
number of operations and the cost of medication has increased. While we
have over 12,000 more doctors and nurses than we had in 2010, they are being
asked to do more. Since 2010, we are seeing 2.4 million more A&E
attendances and 5.9 million more diagnostic tests every year. In 2016, the NHS
in England performed an average of 4,400 more operations every day compared to
2010. That is why many sense that there are pressures and why we need to
do all we can to make things work more smoothly.
In recent days, there has been good news for our
NHS. The Government has been able to confirm that NHS staff including nurses,
midwives, cleaners and porters will receive a pay rise of between 6.5% and 29%.
Additionally, the Health Secretary has announced the largest ever increase in
NHS midwives and maternity support staff, with a plan to train more than 3,000
extra midwives over 4 years, starting with 650 more midwives in training next
year, and planned increases of 1,000 in the subsequent years as capacity
increases.
This will also build on existing, world-leading
measures to make the NHS the safest place in the world to give birth. This
includes an ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal
deaths, and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 2025.