Labour have announced a £26bn Rescue Plan to save the NHS as figures reveal that over 14,500 patients are currently on a waiting list for over 18 weeks at Milton Keynes University Hospital.

The Labour Party has pledged to end the Tory NHS crisis with a £26bn real terms healthcare funding boost to provide safe quality care, recruit the thousands of staff needed, rebuild crumbling facilities and provide modern state of the art equipment. This is over £6bn in real terms more than the funding announced by the Tories last year.

The pledge will aim to reduce the massive number of patients on waiting lists, including the 14,659 people who are currently on a waiting list at Milton Keynes University hospital and have been so for over 18 weeks.

Figures such as these have prompted Labour to take action and announce an annual average 4.3 per cent funding increase for health spending over the next four years, which are funded from Labour’s proposals to reverse corporation tax cuts and taxing the richest in society.

The funding plan comes as experts warn the NHS is heading into one of the worst winters ever with hospitals already reporting ‘black alerts’ with heart-breaking scenes of patients, often elderly, languishing on trolleys.

Labour Parliamentary Candidate for MK North, Charlynne Pullen, said:“We know that MK Hospital workers are doing the best they can, but the struggle to recruit nurses and the pressure on the NHS from Tory funding cuts makes it difficult to provide the very best care. When the Tory government tried to privatise services that MK residents use in Oxford, the local Labour MP stood up the Tories and made sure that services continue to be run by the NHS. It’s clear that you can’t trust the Tories with our NHS, and that only Labour MPs in Milton Keynes would fight to stop privatisation and to make sure our NHS gets the funding it needs.”

Labour Parliamentary Candidate for MK South, Hannah O’Neill, said: “I recently gave birth to my son at Milton Keynes University Hospital and the staff that were involved, from the paramedics to the community team, were as always, exceptional. However it was clear from the systems in place that the NHS has been chronically underfunded for years and the result is that people are having to wait longer for operations and are left languishing on trolleys. This has to stop. Labour have a plan that will deliver real change from day one for our NHS and crucially, protecting it from being sold off to the highest bidder.”