Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.
Not reforming the NHS would have been a much easier decision for me as secretary of state to have taken. We could have just protected the NHS from cuts, put in an extra £12.5bn and left it there. But sooner or later the cracks would have started to show. New treatments would have been held back.
In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.
We know, in Wales or in England - you simply can't trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won't let them; we'll always fight for the NHS.
You all know my commitment to the National Health Service. While I am Secretary of State, the NHS will never be fragmented, privatised or undermined. I am personally committed to an NHS which gives equal access, and excellent care.
There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.
Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.
The NHS is a national organisation, but it is best delivered locally.
The NHS should be proactively using substantial resources across government to intervene and try to deliver positive improvements in people's standards of living.
I want to see prisoners getting support that is every bit as good as that which they would receive from the NHS in the community.
