This month, Lord Darzi published his comprehensive, honest, expert report on the appalling state our health service is in.

Waiting times in A&E, causing not just fear and anxiety – but avoidable deaths. Higher cancer mortality rates than other countries. A deterioration in the health of the nation over the past 15 years.

People have every right to be angry. It’s not just because the NHS is so personal to all of us - it’s because some of these failings are life and death.

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MP Luke MurphyMP Luke Murphy (Image: UK Parliament) Nowhere is this failure more apparent than in the 8am scramble to secure a GP appointment, an exercise more often undertaken in hope rather than expectation.

I know, from having heard from so many residents, the knock-on effects of failing to secure an appointment can be devastating and a source of huge amounts of worry. Conditions go undiagnosed and backlogs build up – nationally millions of people wait longer than a month to be seen.

Our GPs and NHS staff do incredible work, but the last 14 years have left our surgeries over-stretched and under-staffed. Nationally, 350 practices have closed, and we’ve lost over 2,000 GPs since 2015.

Our new government is determined to turn this around. We’ve got a 10-year plan of reform and change. A plan to train the next generation of NHS staff and reform primary care to deliver better access to GPs, moving care out of hospital and into the community, and shifting the focus to prevention.

This includes speeding up treatment and confronting the pressures in GP surgeries, ending the non-dom tax status to pay to train 7,500 more doctors a year, creating 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, and bringing back the family doctor.

But this will take time, and we know we face challenges locally, with new housing developments adding to the need to ensure we have even more GPs put in place to meet demand.

So, as well as supporting action nationally, I’ve also begun to meet with GPs locally so I can work with them to address the challenges practices in our area face, these range from issues faced with expansion to recruitment.

I’ve also been working to support those constituents who’ve contacted me in need of help.

The damage done to the NHS has been more than a decade in the making. We clearly have a long road ahead. But while the NHS is broken, it’s not beaten.

We will turn the NHS around, so it is there for you when you need it, once again.