Service celebrates its 70th birthday.

Formed in 1948, it was the first state

health service in the world.

Today, the modern NHS is almost unrecognizable

from the one that was created 70 years ago.

It's the world's fifth biggest employer

with a budget of 110 billion pounds a year.

But it's in urgent need of treatment.

Like many healthcare systems, the NHS is faced

with a funding shortfall and critical staff shortages

meaning its future looks perilous.

Lord Ara Darzi is one of the world's top surgeons

and a former British Health Minister.

He's been on the healthcare frontline for three decades.

And he's come up with a plan for reviving the NHS.

These are my talking points.

The government needs to transform the NHS from

a sickness service to a health and wellbeing service.

Most of the chronic disease is related to human behavior.

The NHS spends almost nine billion pounds

a year dealing with diseases related to smoking

and the growing obesity epidemic.

To cut costs, the government needs to tackle

this public health crisis at its root.

We do this in three ways.

One, regulation, banning smoking was

a wonderful example of that.

Second, taxation.

Introducing sugar tax, or a levy on alcohol.

Thirdly, behavioral intervention.

How do we help people make the right choices?

We need to embrace innovation whether that is digital

which has transformed every aspect of our life,

we need to do the same in health.

The NHS is still running on paper and fax.

We need to move from that archaic times

into the new times of digital.

The NHS is the world's largest purchaser

of fax machines and in some hospitals,

medical equipment is no longer fit for purpose.

A recent report found that machines from the 1980s

were still in use in NHS hospitals.

We need to decommission the old stuff

and save money to pay for the new innovations.

Robotics, new drugs, new interventions.

We need to look at frugal innovations,

technologies that are exceptionally cheap

but at the same time delivering as good an outcome

from a patient's perspective.

In the 21st century, data is the energy

or the fuel of transformation.

Anything you could measure you can improve

and data is one of the ways of doing that.

One million people use the NHS every 36 hours.

But there's no centralized system where doctors

can access their medical data.

Most patients seeing me expect me to have

all the data from their general practice.

We need to drive this integration between

primary care, hospital, and back into the community.

You can actually predict disease before you see

the manifestation of disease by segmenting the population

and identifying those at great risk.

To do this, the NHS will have to tackle

fears over personal data being shared.

Sharing data is critical from a patient's perspective.

And we need to win the confidence of the public when it

comes to the privacy and security aspect of data sharing.

The NHS is facing a funding gap.

By 2020, it's estimated to be 20 billion pounds short.

A lot of people out there think investing in healthcare

is in a bottomless pit.

I could confidently tell you, not just my work,

look at the work of the Lancet Commission,

the World Innovation Summit for Healthcare,

the best return on investment any country

could make is in health.

Healthy nation means a productive nation.

Healthy nation means economic growth.

For every pound you spend in health,

you get two pounds back.

Quality should be the organizing principle

of any health system.

It's a wonderful future if we embrace it.