Star comment: Struggling NHS needs restructure

And latest figures that show more than 1,000 hours of ambulance time was wasted by handover delays in a single month in the Black Country and Staffordshire, emphasising the scale of the problem.

That is not in anyway a criticism of those working in the health service, but it exemplifies the challenges that they face. Our hospitals, particularly the A&E departments, are struggling to keep up with demand.

Rather than acting as a place for emergency cases, in far too many cases they are the first port of call. This cannot go on. It is too easy to lay the blame on the public.

Certainly more needs to be done to inform and educate certain members of society – but Government needs to look at the wider health and social care system.

Can you really blame people for turning up at their local A&E if they cannot get hold of an out-of-hours doctor or they have been told to wait three hours for an ambulance or paramedic?

With an ageing population we need to restructure and repurpose elements of our NHS.

It needs to be more flexible and adapt to the changing needs of the people who use it. And social care is the key part in this.

Theresa May and the Conservatives were widely – and rightly – criticised over the so-called ‘dementia tax’.

But she was right to be honest about the challenges the country faces.

Unless we are willing to confront those challenges the crisis will get worse. And that will pile further strain and pressure on the whole health service. We cannot look at certain parts of this country’s health service in isolation.

We cannot have whole tranches of the system working in silo. And we need to be honest about the funding.

This country spends £125bn on health every year, and not all of it is spent efficiently and effectively.

Before making the case for more money, we need to be open about whether it is being used wisely.

By getting to the bottom of problems like handover delays we can free up beds, make paramedics more available, and save money.

But that can only happen by looking at the whole picture.