A new day dawns for the health service The Prime Minister's personal commitment to our NHS is clear. Rightly, the Government is investing an additional £12.5 billion in our health service by 2015. As our population ages, the cost of care is also rising, with more people living for longer with chronic medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and dementia. How we better deliver care to people with long-term illnesses and disabilities is the big challenge facing our NHS, and there is growing medical evidence that up to a third of older patients currently in our hospitals do not need to be there and could, indeed should, be better looked after in the community. This highlights the fact that, for too long, the previous Labour government focused primarily on pumping more and more money into a reactive model of health care in which older people and patients with long-term conditions and disabilities often only accessed care and support when they reached crisis point. There is no dignity in admitting older people to hospital when, with proper community support, such admissions are avoidable and care could be provided better at home. The cost to the NHS of lost bed days and inappropriate admissions is something we can no longer afford. From today, a patient arriving at A&E or at their GP surgery will not see a big-bang change. Frontline health-care professionals will continue to look after patients just as we always have done. But, over time, there will be steady improvements in the quality of services and care available, because from today we will see doctors and nurses being given more power to make decisions than ever before. We are giving responsibility for commissioning budgets to GPs. Not for the sake of structure, but for the sake of patients. GPs understand their patients better than anyone else, and putting them in charge will offer greater support for patients and help reduce inappropriate hospital admissions, particularly for the elderly. In my own county, Suffolk, putting GPs in charge has already reduced hospital admissions of older people from general practice by around 15 per cent because people are now being better looked after in their own homes and communities. It would be easy to see the Francis Report and the NHS reforms as two separate issues. They are not. The decade of 2000-10 was a time of inflation-busting rises in the NHS budget. Yet the events of Mid Staffs show us that money must be spent more wisely in our NHS - less bureaucracy, fewer targets, and more focus on better outcomes and better patient experience of care, particularly for the elderly. As a practising NHS hospital doctor, and as a Government health minister, I am proud to work in a national health service that has for decades been admired throughout the world. But it is because I care about our NHS that I recognise that, if it is to remain the envy of the world, it has to change. Mid Staffordshire was the NHS's darkest hour, and the darkest hour always comes before the dawn. As dawn breaks today, doctors and nurses will have a much greater say in how our health service will be run and patients will be the winners. Dan Poulter is a health minister and a practising NHS doctor