This week the Government launched our NHS Long Term Plan, a 10-year plan which will enable people to live healthier lives for longer. The Long Term Plan has been agreed with NHS leading clinicians and health experts and will secure the future of the NHS by bringing forward a long-term plan for the NHS and a five-year funding settlement.
Under the Government’s plan, NHS funding will grow year on year and by 2023-24 the NHS England budget will increase by £20.5 billion in real terms compared with today. That means there will be £394 million a week additional resource in real terms supporting our precious NHS.
There will be a new focus on prevention, personal responsibility and promoting good health, and more rapid diagnostics and new treatments that will improve the care we all receive. From birth, through the challenges that life brings and into old age, the plan will ensure that the NHS will do much more to support people to stay healthy, rather than just treat them when ill.
The NHS plays a vital part in our lives, and we should never forget the extraordinary staff who are the everyday heroes providing support and care for us, day in, day out. The Long Term Plan for the NHS will help provide greater certainty to the staff and to all of us as patients of the National Health Service.
Like you, my family and I have always relied on the NHS. I want to see us continue to preserve the value of fairness on which it was founded, whilst building the NHS of the future, ensuring it is there for generations to come, just as it has been in the past. I am therefore delighted that the Government are backing their actions with resources to benefit all of us.