The creation of the National Health Service back in 1948 lifted a massive worry from people's lives. For the first time, health care did not depend on wealth.

Need, not ability to pay, was what mattered. Every family in Britain - and certainly mine - has its own reasons to thank the creators of the NHS and the expertise and dedication of its nurses and doctors.

But while support for the NHS remains strong - and in particular for its founding principles - in recent years there's been increasing concern. Concern, for instance, about growing delays and patchy standards of care.

About why health funding has not kept pace with other comparable countries. And these concerns, in turn, have fed fears about the very survival of the Health Service in the new century.

I understand these fears but I do not share them. I believe the values and principles behind the Health Service are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago.

But I also accept that only by renewing and modernising our health service fundamentally can we re assure the country that the Health Service will continue to meet its health needs This has meant confronting two problems which have hamstrung the effectiveness of the Health Service over decades - chronic under funding number one, and two, the shortcomings of a system designed really to meet the health needs and ambitions of 1948.

We tackled the under funding first. Because we 've taken steps as a government to restore stability to the economy, public finances being put back in shape and because we 've created the conditions where there are now a million fewer people in benefit and a million more people in work the country can now afford the record - and sustained - investment that the NHS needs over the next few years.

This year's Budget delivered an annual funding increase of more than 6% above inflation for those four years - twice the real terms increase that the NHS has received over its history. But past lack of investment is not to blame for all the shortcomings in the Health Service.

It can not explain for instance, why services in one hospital can be so much better than those in another in the same town. Indeed, sometimes the whole debate about shortage of money has helped mask other serious failures in the health service which risk wasting the extra investment that we now want to put in.

So the challenge we laid down when we announced the extra money is that the Government would deliver the investment but the money had to be accompanied by modernisation and reform of the chronic system failures of the NHS. That's what the first ever National Plan for the NHS, published on Thursday, delivers.