Crawley MP, Henry Smith, yesterday welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcement that the NHS budget will be further increased to include an additional £140 million aimed at easing the bureaucratic burden on nurses and midwives.

Henry commented:

“As a vocal supporter of the hard work that local healthcare workers do for us in Crawley, it is with great pleasure that I can report that the Government has allocated the NHS with an additional £140 million in funding for the relief of bureaucratic pressures on frontline NHS staff.

“As someone whose wife worked for many years in the NHS at Crawley and East Surrey hospitals, as well as a teaching hospital in London, I have personal, enormous respect for the professionalism of people who work in the Health Service and the contribution they make to delivering high quality care.

“Earlier in the year I welcomed the Government’s commitment to an additional £35 million in local NHS funding, despite the harsh economic climate that they’ve had the invidious task of grappling with, on following through on our commitments as the Conservative Party to not only protect NHS funding but indeed to proactively increase fund allocations in real terms.

“The Government’s actions are in stark contrast to those of the Labour Party which is cutting the NHS budget in Wales where it is in control of the Assembly. 

“Bureaucratic paperwork is all-too-frequently an unnecessary and time consuming exercise that our hard working front line NHS staff have had to endure and so I’m pleased that the Government’s listened to the concerns of NHS staff and acted to ensure that new measures can be financed to ease the burden on their workload.”

The Prime Minister also announced a £15 million cancer radiotherapy innovation fund, with a guarantee that from next April all cancer patients in England will get the most innovative radiotherapy where it is appropriate and cost-effective.