NHS: Health Secretary Wes Streeting ‘stunned’ by NHS failings

It is the second month in a row the waiting list has gone up, but it is still below the 7.77 million peak recorded in September.

The investigation – led by NHS surgeon and independent peer Lord Ara Darzi – will help inform Mr Streeting’s 10-year plan for the NHS.

He told the BBC that one of the things that had struck him in his first week as the health and social care secretary was that there was “worse to come.”

There were a number of things that are known about the health service and the way in which patients’ safety is treated and how people are held to account for performance that is not yet in the public domain, adding that there was “more to come.”

He said he would set this out in the coming weeks and the independent investigation would have his support.

He said this was so that “we can spell out really clearly really transparently the scale of the failure in the NHS.”

Mr Streeting also said that they were going to take steps to make sure that senior managers are regulated so that if whistleblowers are silenced by managers, those managers do not work in the NHS anymore.

“That’s how seriously I take that issue, ” he said.

Mr Streeting told The Sun newspaper the NHS could be turned around, but first it was important to diagnose the problem.

“It’s clear to anyone who works in or uses the NHS that it is broken.”

He said during the election campaign he heard from people across the country who had been let down including an 88-year-old woman who fell out of bed and waited three hours for an ambulance and an RAF veteran who has been waiting 15 months for an operation.