Over seven million people are currently on NHS waiting lists: Can Labour transform the health service?

The government has pledged to revitalise the NHS with promises to cut waiting times and modernising services.

Transcript

00:00Which, dare I say, most people hope to never have to use, but if we do, then we want it

00:08to be the best it can be.

00:10And we hear all sorts of sort of stories of sort of people sort of on trolleys.

00:13Indeed, I was listening to a phone in very recently, and they were talking about people

00:17sort of being brought in.

00:18And of course, these are often older people with ailments, being on trolleys for sort

00:22of for days on end, sleeping in chairs.

00:25So there's a big, big crisis.

00:27And it's certainly sort of in a pretty poor shape, probably pretty dreadful shape compared

00:33to when the sort of the government or this Labour government left office in 2010.

00:38So who do you blame for that?

00:40Well, of course, the sort of the current government will say that the sort of the Conservative

00:43Party have sort of starved of cash.

00:45But of course, they will say that it's a sort of it's a it's a big organisation and you

00:50have to sort of keep putting lots of money into it.

00:53Well, Labour has pledged to revitalise the NHS by cutting waiting times, shifting care

00:58closer to home, integrating social care and modernising services through digital transformation.

01:05Labour has called the NHS's current state a national scandal.

01:10And if I say that the NHS employs something like one and a half million people and its

01:16budget this year is well over sort of 190 billion.

01:20It's the sort of the it's a huge consumer of sort of cash, which, of course, the sort

01:25of this government doesn't have a lot of to splash about because of the sort of the problem

01:30is it again, it argues it's inherited from the previous administration.

01:35It is a worsening situation within the NHS.

01:38Over three million patients are waiting over 18 weeks for treatment, 234,000 over a year

01:45with a median wait time of 14.2 weeks.

01:49The point is, though, that many people when faced with crisis, that they are in a pretty

01:55poor sort of situation or treated really badly and that surely should not continue.