COMING from parents that gave their working lives to the National Health Service (NHS), its performance is incredibly important to me.

The main reason that I became an MP was because of my own daughter’s experience in the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).

At the General Election, fixing the NHS was one of Labour's main missions. Quietly, with little fanfare, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has been leading a revolution in the NHS, sweeping away layers of bureaucracy and waste and significantly focussing funds into frontline services.

It seems like an age ago now but at the end of 2024 the Dazi Report laid the foundations for change that have been followed through with tangible progress being seen across the service in the last 18 months.

We’ve already got waiting lists falling to the lowest level in three years, four hour waits in A&E to the best level in four years, and ambulances arriving faster than for half a decade. In Cornwall we are seeing NHS waiting times fall, ambulance waiting times fall, the new diagnostics centre open at Camborne and Redruth hospital and a much more proactive approach to healthcare across the constituency.

But we have way, way further to go yet to fix the NHS which, never ever forget, was on its knees and at risk of total collapse under the Conservatives.

One aspect of the NHS that Wes Streeting is going to be focussed on in coming months is the issue of ‘corridor care’. Corridor care has gone from something that only ever happened in a crisis, to normal practice for the NHS. It is baked in. The NHS had even started calling corridors “temporary escalation spaces.” It wasn’t even being measured. Corridor care is not normal; it is a disgrace and this Labour government is going to end it. The good news is that parts of the NHS are already leading the way on this.

So, the government is taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS, by taking the lessons from those NHS trusts which are clearing their corridors to those where corridor care is most entrenched. Crack teams of top clinicians are going into hospitals with the highest levels of corridor care to work with local hospital leaders and turn it around.

The government is investing an extra £215-million this year into new and expanded urgent treatment centres and same day emergency centres, to unclog A&Es and get patients seen faster. That is part of the £26-billion extra that the Labour government is investing in the NHS; investment that was voted against by every other political party. And we all know what Nigel Farage wants to do with the NHS: replace it with an insurance-based system.

A trip to A&E can set you back more than £1,300 in the US. With Labour the NHS will always be publicly owned, free at the point of need, and with this Labour Government, it’s on the road to recovery.