ONE of the most compelling reasons that 14 months ago the country gave Labour a huge majority at the General Election, was the promise to fix our National Health Service (NHS).

My father was a local GP in Pool and my mum was a nurse at Treliske, so dragging the NHS off its knees, after 14 years of shocking mismanagement by the Conservatives, is personal for me.

We began by ending the resident doctors strike, secured a huge budget from the Treasury, launched the 10 year Health Plan that was informed by the Darzi report, set about making structural changes to remove duplication by scrapping NHS England, and ruthlessly focussing on frontline services. That strategy is working.

At the General Election, we committed to delivering two-million extra appointments in our first year. We achieved four-million and that has already now risen to five-million in barely 14 months.

Anecdotally I am hearing that people are getting seen quicker than a year ago and a massive part of that success is down to the people that actually work in the NHS. They really are remarkable – having to manage with almost constant reorganisation and in terribly tough working conditions. I also hear anecdotally of people that are still not seen quickly enough: those that have been waiting for operations or treatment for far too long; those that are still waiting weeks to see a GP or that cannot navigate the seemingly daunting task of booking online appointments; those that are suffering terrible oral pain because they have been unable to see an NHS dentists and cannot afford to see a private one.

We know that we have a vast amount of work still to do. But we are one year into a five-year term and the structural challenges we face will take time to overcome.

I have every faith that, in Wes Streeting, we have the right person at the top to overcome those challenges. I have spoken with Wes specifically about health inequalities and the way the Carr-Hill Formula – the formula used to allocated GP funding – is broken as it doesn’t apply adequate weighting to areas of poverty and deprivation, like my Camborne, Redruth and Hayle constituency.

Wes has listened intently. He knows the challenges we face and I have explained the ongoing pain being suffered by too many of my constituents. He also knows that this is personal for me and that I will not consider it a job well done until our communities have simple access to the health and dental care they need, prompt scheduling and delivery of surgery or treatment, and an NHS that they trust and that we can all be proud of again.

There are hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country right now that are working hard to improve our NHS and dental care services. They may be in the shadows but their work is beginning to be felt. We will fix and deliver once again an NHS free at the point of use for all, not based on what and when you can pay as Reform UK want, but the NHS my mum and dad were proud to work in.