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Nurses should be given a greater say in how the National Health Service is run, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has pledged.
In a keynote speech to the Royal College of Nursing’s congress Clegg said frontline staff should tell politicians how the NHS should operate and "change the way power flows in the NHS".
The party leader said politicians have a duty to say how they will "protect and improve" the NHS in the face of the anticipated public sector spending cuts.
He pledged to channel savings from the health budget into "Cinderella services" in the NHS which have been lacking in funding.
Clegg said he would give frontline staff control over their ward or unit budgets, and would allow them to "establish not-for-profit social enterprises or [department store] John Lewis-style employee trusts to run services of all kinds within the NHS".
The NHS must be turned "on its head", he said. Allowing power to "flow up", while nurses must help to "make it happen".
Clegg told the congress in Bournemouth: "I am wholly committed, head and heart, to keeping our NHS free when people need it and paid for by us all.
"But you and I also know that's the easy bit to say, the real question that politicians now have to answer is not: How much do you love the NHS?
"It is right to celebrate nursing and the NHS as a whole, but it doesn't deal with the central issue I know worries every one of you.
"The real question that politicians now have to answer is not 'how much do you love the NHS?'
"It's 'how do you protect and improve the NHS at a time like this?'"
Clegg said the "old politics" would be to make unfunded promises "and hit you with surprises after the election".
But the party leader pledged to give nursing staff a greater say in how the NHS was run – including indentifying savings.
He said: "We will look for efficiency and unnecessary programmes of spending wherever they lie.
"But because the NHS faces exceptional demographic pressures, savings we identify within the health service will be diverted, penny for penny, pound for pound, to areas of the NHS which have been starved of cash, or could be in future years.
"Areas like dementia, where demographic pressures are high, cancer, where the costs of treatment are rising, and mental health, which has been a Cinderella service within the NHS for far too long."
Yesterday the prime minister addressed the conference, promising that no-one in England would wait more than one week for cancer test results under a future Labour government if they are re-elected.
Brown hailed the NHS as "the best insurance policy in the world" and told the conference that nurses were "the soul of the NHS".
He struck a highly personal note as he praised the work of NHS staff, recalling the death of his daughter Jennifer, who died in 2002 aged 10 days.
The Conservatives have pledged to "ring-fence" NHS funding if elected, protecting it from the cuts that will fall on the public sector.
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