We must not constantly talk about tackling obesity and warning people about the negative consequences of obesity. Instead we must be positive – positive about the fun and benefits to be had from healthy living,...

The job of the government – and my responsibility – is to help people live healthier lives. The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve...

We have to treat smoking as a major public health issue. We have to reduce the extent to which young people start smoking, and one of the issues is the extent to which display of...

I didn’t go into politics because I wanted to win a popularity contest.

I know that nurses are not only the largest healthcare profession but are responsible for the delivery of most healthcare, and are often in the best place to be able to see the whole pathway...

I became a Conservative in the late 1980s because I could see that the Conservative party had transformed Britain’s economy and our standing in the world compared to Labour in the 1980s.

Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is...

Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of...

The culture is about moving to a place where tobacco and smoking isn’t part of normal life: people don’t encounter it normally, they don’t see it in their big supermarkets, they don’t see people smoking...

If I’m serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can’t have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need.

Tackling the environment should not be a licence to lecture people, because they have no excuse not to exercise, or eat their fruit and vegetables. Nannying – at least among adults – is likely to...

Not reforming the NHS would have been a much easier decision for me as secretary of state to have taken. We could have just protected the NHS from cuts, put in an extra £12.5bn and...

Tell people that biology and the environment cause obesity and they are offered the one thing we have to avoid: an excuse. As it is, people who see more fat people around them may themselves...

We know, in Wales or in England – you simply can’t trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won’t...

You all know my commitment to the National Health Service. While I am Secretary of State, the NHS will never be fragmented, privatised or undermined. I am personally committed to an NHS which gives equal...

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

I have spent too long with too many people who have lost loved ones to healthcare-associated infections not to be determined to act on this. There is no tolerable level of preventable infections. The only...

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to...