The health secretary, Alan Milburn sought to regain the support of disaffected voters by placing improvements to NHS cancer services and care for elderly people at the heart of his speech to Labour conference.He also curried favour with the Labour faithful with promises to improve nurses pay, end the privatisation of hospital cleaning services, and enforce a ban on recently qualified NHS consultants carrying out private work.
The NHS will grow by a third by 2004, with more beds, more hospitals, more medical students and 20,000 more nurses, the health secretary said.
He admitted NHS improvements would take time and would not be easy, saying that not every problem had been solved: "But steadily and surely, people will see the NHS growing bigger, getting better, becoming the best."
Announcing the publication of a national cancer plan, he promised more cancer specialists, more cancer equipment, shorter waiting times for cancer treatment and extra cash for hospices.
"Our aim is the fastest improvement in cancer services anywhere in Europe. By 2010, our cancer survival rates will be amongst the best in Europe," he told delegates.
Mr Milburn also moved to placate elderly voters, admitting that the elderly do not always get the standards of NHS care they deserve.
He announced that standards would be published soon to end age discrimination against elderly people. Support for carers would be doubled to £100m a year within three years.
Nursing care would be free in nursing homes from next year, mixed sex wards would be abolished, health and social services would work together more closely, and £900m would be invested in rehabilitation services.
Mr Milburn promised to recruit 20,000 more nurses for the NHS, give them more responsibility on the wards and improve their pay. "More nurses more power, more pay. That is what this Labour government will deliver."
Perhaps the loudest cheer of his speech accompanied his promise to abolish the privatisation of NHS cleaning, portering and other support services.
"All too often Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) lowered standards of cleanliness in our hospitals… CCT has not improved care for patients. It has damaged the NHS for far too long. It will now go."
The health secretary also pleased delegates by reaffirming his commitment, made in the NHS plan early this year, to prevent newly qualified consultants from carrying out private practice for seven years.
"For too long the issue of consultants' private practice has been left unresolved. Today we have the courage to make this change."
He reaffirmed the government's commitment to the NHS, calling it the "fairest and most efficient way of providing healthcare for all." He vowed "never to go down the route" of private healthcare.
"Our investment in cancer services symbolises our ambition for the whole health service; an NHS no longer behind the best in Europe - but a health service, growing bigger, getting better - aiming to be the best."
The Tories came under predictable fire as "the political wing of the private healthcare movement," who would introduce private health insurance - a "Tory tax on old age".
