The NHS is the Labour Party’s greatest achievement. Labour created the NHS, working with staff, Labour saved the NHS, and we will always support it. Since 1997, Labour’s investment and reform have delivered real improvements for patients after 18 years of Tory neglect and underinvestment. Addenbroke’s Hospital stands testament to this fact. In March 1997, 1790 people had been waiting over six months for inpatient treatment.  At the same time, over 3,000 had been waiting just as long as outpatients. After ten years of Labour Government both figures have been reduced to zero. Now we can guarantee that people wait at longest eighteen weeks for treatment, and generally it is much quicker. This would never have happened under the Conservatives. We also guarantee a two-week turn-around for tests for cancer – the Conservatives have said that they scrap this guarantee.

It is not just the eye catching initiatives that matter however. When people visit Addenbrooke’s or the Rosie, the last thing they need to be worrying about is their car parking ticket. We’ve listened to patients who have told us that this is something they want changed. The NHS has always been good at the big life-saving things – now we want to focus even more on improving the experience for patients and visitors. Phasing out parking charges within three years is one small step in this direction.

We want to help people be more healthy, not just treat their illness. We are rolling out a national programme of vascular checks for everyone aged between 40 and 74, to prevent at least 9,500 heart attacks and strokes every year and save 2,000 lives.  By the end of 2010, we will have extended the ages at which adults are screened so that an additional 500,000 women will be screened for breast cancer and 2 million men and women will be screened for bowel cancer.

In these tough times, we cannot afford to cut frontline services. We know that by harnessing new technologies we can continue to make efficiency savings and I want to see some of those benefits coming back directly to patients and their families.  Likewise, at UNISON I work for the rights of low-paid workers, many of them women, in the public sector, and understand what tough jobs people do in terms of healthcare provision. For all the Tory scaremongering, spending budgets are fixed until 2011. To maintain our health system against the sweeping cuts of David Cameron and George Osborne, we need a Labour Government.