Giving patients more of a say and staff more freedom to shape high quality care around patients’ needs are the core messages unveiled today by leading surgeon and Health Minister Lord Ara Darzi.

After a 12-month review into the NHS, involving 2,000 clinicians and 60,000 patients across the country, Lord Darzi has published High Quality Care for All which sets out plans to build on the past decade of NHS progress.

The Review will:

•    Give patients even greater influence over the services they use by guaranteeing choice and access to the most clinically and cost effective drugs and treatments.
•    Make healthcare more personal by ensuring that everyone with a long-term condition has their own personalised care plan and by piloting personal health budgets.
•    Create an NHS that helps people to stay healthy by rolling out a new national programme of vascular risk assessment for people aged between 40 and 74, and rewarding family doctors for focusing on prevention and early intervention.
•    Raise the standards on quality within the NHS by systematically measuring and publishing information about the quality of care from the frontline up.
•    Foster a pioneering NHS by introducing new funds and prizes to support and reward innovation, and developing new best practice tariffs targeted on areas for improvement.
•    Empower frontline staff by enabling them to lead and manage their organisations and improving the quality of NHS education and training.

Today’s announcement coincides with the publication of a draft NHS Constitution, bringing together for the first time all of the principles of care in our national health service and giving patients the right to choose both treatment and providers.

Labour’s Health Secretary, Alan Johnson MP, said: "There are big challenges ahead but the NHS is clearly in much better shape than it was ten years ago - borne out by increasing satisfaction rates among patients and public. My first job as Health Secretary was to launch this review with the Prime Minister and I'd like to thank Lord Darzi for his outstanding work over the past year, reaching parts of the health service never reached before.

"These locally driven, clinically led plans show how quality of care will be raised right across the country, with doctors and nurses supported to offer big improvements in treatment at the bedside. Quality of life will be improved and more lives will be saved."