News from The Labour Party

Tory policy on cancer guarantee would put lives at risk

Labour’s Health Minister Mike O’Brien said: “This is an incredibly important ambition for the NHS. A clear, costed and deliverable plan to bring cancer test waiting times down from more than a month for some people to just one week for everyone so that 1.5 million people will be seen more quickly.

“The Conservative policy of scrapping our cancer guarantee would be tantamount to putting 200 lives each week at risk.

“The Conservatives try and write this off as scaremongering, but this is a cowardly and frankly shameful response. It is their policy to end our guarantees, and they should explain why millions of people will have to wait longer, with them in Government, to find out if they have cancer.

“With Labour we will ensure people are offered cancer tests and results within one week. Our guarantee is that if you aren’t offered these within one week, you have the right to go private on the NHS.

“These guarantees are the basic minimum standards that the NHS should offer.”

At Labour’s NHS rally on Saturday 24 April, Gordon Brown said that with Labour, the NHS will continue to get better.

The Prime Minister said: “A good National Health Service will always with a Labour Government become a better National Health Service.

“Everyone should have the right, a personal guarantee from us, enforceable by the patient, to see a cancer specialist within two weeks. But we want to do even better in the next Parliament and we want to be able to say that everyone who needs a diagnosis should be able to get that cancer diagnosis not within two weeks but within one week, often on the same day.

“That’s because we want to remove the fear that is associated with worry about cancer.”

Tracey Cheetham, who received treatment for breast cancer, said: “I survived cancer because I got treatment quickly on the NHS otherwise I would have died. Why does David Cameron want to take this right to survive away?”

On Monday 26 April Gordon Brown will address the RCN conference where he will expand on his policy ideas on the future the NHS.

The commitment to deliver one-week cancer tests and results will require significant capital investment into primary care, as well a clear national target and reform of the way in which GP practices work. To make this investment we have committed over the next 5 years to £1bn of new capital investment (£200m pa) into primary and community services.

This will be the first priority for future capital investment in the NHS. It is possible because Labour has invested more than £10bn over the last decade in rebuilding the crumbling NHS estate. As we complete our once in a generation programme of hospital building, we will re-focus capital investment on primary and community services so that we rival the best healthcare systems in the world with our ability to identify disease.

Other news from The Labour Party

• Miliband tells Cameron: Save 6,000 nurses by abandoning NHS reorganisation now - 5 February 2012
• "We need what you might call 'one nation banking'" - 3 February 2012
• Burnham: "Mental health must move from the edges to the centre of the NHS" - 31 January 2012