Labour has pledged to slash NHS waiting times and fill thousands of vacancies in the North East, but concedes that the health service’s crisis will not be solved overnight.

Wes Streeting today promised the “biggest expansion of NHS staff in history” as he visited the region.

During a visit to Barnard Castle, the shadow health secretary vowed that a Labour government would cut backlogs that have left 99,000 people on waiting lists at Newcastle’s hospitals alone, while  8,400 patients in Newcastle and Gateshead were waiting more than 28 days for a GP appointment in December.

The opposition party has said it would train 15,000 new doctors a year by doubling the number of medical school places and train 10,000 additional nurses and midwives every year – a move it plans to pay for by abolishing the non-dom tax status.

Ahead of his trip to the Richardson Community Hospital, Mr Streeting told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “There is no doubt that the NHS is going through the biggest crisis in its history. We have got the longest waiting lists ever and you can see that with almost 100,000 people waiting for treatment in the Newcastle trust alone, including over 4,000 who have been waiting more than a year.

“One of the key challenges for the NHS is that there simply aren’t enough doctors and nurses for patients to get the treatment they need on time, which is why Labour has committed to the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history.”

Latest figures showed 17,500 NHS vacancies across the North East and Yorkshire as of last September, up by more than 5,000 on the previous year.

However, Mr Streeting conceded that he was “not going to pretend that the scale of the crisis in the NHS can be solved overnight by an incoming Labour government”.

He admitted that reform of the NHS “will have to do more of the heavy lifting” rather than major government investment because of the current economic climate.

Mr Streeting has also proposed using empty beds in private hospitals to bring down NHS waiting lists, but insisted to the LDRS that he was “totally committed” to keeping the NHS free at point of use.

He said that the NHS buying up space in private hospitals would only be used as an emergency measure to prevent people who cannot afford to pay for healthcare “being left behind”.

He added: “We are spending almost £200bn-a-year on the NHS. That is a lot of money and we aren’t currently spending it in the right places.

“Because the government is not investing enough in primary care services, in general practice and other primary care services people are waiting longer for diagnoses, which means their treatment is more expensive and less effective.

“If we shift the focus of healthcare out of hospital and into the community, do faster diagnosis, we can not only treat people faster and with better outcomes, we can do so making better use of taxpayer money.”