A major review of the NHS shows that people “are paying more and getting less”, according to Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
He was commenting on the publication of a report from Lord Darzi which says that the NHS is in a critical condition.
Streeting told GB News: “There are some things in it that even having shadowed health and social care in opposition, and having now been the health and social care secretary for the last nine weeks, there are some things in there that shocked even me.
“That shocked Lord Darzi, who's been in the NHS for decades and really points to why we need not just investment but reform.
“Because if you look at what's happened in our hospitals, for example, staffing numbers have grown significantly since 2019 but productivity has fallen, so we are paying more and getting less.
“Cancer in this country is more likely to be a death sentence than it is in other comparable countries, adults and children are less healthy today than they were a decade ago.
“And the importance of this report, from my perspective, and why I commissioned it, is if you don't get the diagnosis right, you're less likely to get the right prescription.
“I have got now, I think, both the mandate, the evidence from the doctor, the diagnosis from the doctor about the sickness of our NHS and the sickness of our society, and from the General Election, a mandate and an instruction to deliver. That is exactly what we are going to do.
“We've hit the ground running in the last nine weeks, and I hope giving people confidence about the action we will take, whether that's resolving the junior doctors disputes, so that we create the conditions in which the NHS can recover, or putting £100 million into employing 1,000 more GPs by the end of this year, so that we deal with both GP unemployment, the fact people can't get a GP appointment.
“And also making sure that we get to people earlier with health checks in communities and in the workplaces, better for patients, better for the taxpayers.
“Those are just some of the things we've done in the last nine weeks. There is a hell of a lot more to do, and the reassurance I want to give to your viewers is we are not going to duck the difficult choices.
“We are not going to ignore hard truth and we are not going to sweep the problems under the carpet. As a Labour Party, we are not going to get into dewy-eyed nostalgia about what the NHS was when it was created 76 years ago.
“We are going to face up to the hard choices and challenges today, so the NHS is there for us for the next 76 years and we deal with the awful situation we see today.”
