Speaking at the NHS Confed Expo conference in Liverpool yesterday health and social care secretary Sajid Javid spoke of his determination to ensure every pound of taxpayer’s money is well spent in the health and care system.

He also spoke of the need for the strongest health and social care leadership and better partnerships between health and care services.

Over the next three years, the Health and Care Levy will allow £39 billion of additional spending on the health and care sector in an attempt to reduce waiting times and ease pressures on the workforce. Javid said progress is already being made with hundreds of thousands of patients receiving vital care more quickly through more than 90 new community diagnostics centres providing access to tests closer to home, and delivering over one million additional checks already, providing earlier diagnoses.

The secretary said progress is being made on cutting waiting times with the number of people on the longest waits halved in the past four months.

Javid also spoke about the power of partnerships and learning from the pandemic to strengthen ways of working between different health and care services and drive down waiting times, citing the example of South London Health and Community Partnership – a partnership of three mental health trusts – which brought out-of-area patients down by a third and readmissions down by two-thirds.

Javid said: “It’s not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about listening to the innovators already doing incredible things within the system – then giving them a platform to do it. There are also some 50 acute trust collaboratives and mixed collaborative, bringing together acute, specialist, mental health and community providers. They’ve already shown that when we partner like this, challenges that appear intractable in one place can be resolved in another.”

Over the next 12 months Javid said the government will deliver: a digital health and care plan; a health disparities White Paper; 10-year plans on cancer, dementia and mental health; a reset of the NHS Long Term Plan; and a Health Education England workforce framework followed by the NHS’s first-ever 15-year workforce strategy.

Javis continued: “I’ve been determined we keep moving forward, because this moment in time we dare not lose. It’s a moment when we can combine valuable lessons from the pandemic, with incredible new technology and innovative ways of working, which when taken together, help us face the challenges of the future. It’s a small window of time where we can make a big difference.”

On leadership, he reflected on the findings from General Sir Gordon Messenger and Dame Linda Pollard’s review into health and social care leadership published last week. The review found various examples of exceptional leadership in difficult circumstances. However, it also highlighted reports of poor behaviour, bullying and discrimination in certain parts of the health and social care system.

Javid said: “Just as Gordon and Linda found that bad behaviour was contagious, they found that great leadership was contagious too. It works best when everyone – even those without leader in their job description – feels like a leader. Other recommendations around training, standards and management will support this effort – helping the workforce at all levels, by creating the conditions for everyone to thrive.”

The secretary of state concluded his speech by saying the government is ensuring the NHS has the necessary tools to boost its workforce and is able to use data to tackle the Covid backlog. And the NHS resource budget will increase to more than £160 billion in 2024 to 2025 on top of £5.9 billion of capital investment to support diagnostics, technology, and elective recovery.