It's time for Mr Streeting to keep his promise and roll-out the osteoporosis plan

Wes Streeting promised during the election that one of his first acts as Health Secretary would be to order a roll-out plan for fracture clinics.

And yet, worryingly, six months on, nothing has happened.

Since the pledge was made, another 27,000 hospital bed days have been taken up by 2,500 people whose broken bones could have been prevented.

Agonising disability. Lives cut short after shattered hips. Mothers and grandmothers lost before their time.

And all because half of NHS trusts have negligently ignored the need for diagnostic services.

Mr Streeting's diagnosis of the NHS is right. It's broken. It ignores prevention. It lets problems boil over into crisis before treating people. It racks up enormous costs in the process.

There's no more vivid example of this than osteoporosis, where two thirds of patients are denied safe, effective bone medication which costs as little as £12 per year. The Sunday Express Better Bones campaign is the longest newspaper campaign on record. Ironically, politicians from all parties have called these fracture clinics "a no-brainer" from the start.

The only thing stopping them being set up has been an obscene game of pass-the-parcel between Whitehall departments over whose budget should pay. The families of people who die following broken hips won't forgive the politicians if this continues any longer.

As a proportion of the NHS's £182billion budget, the
money needed to set up these fracture services is trivial.

Hardly even a rounding error. So enough with reviews, strategies and meetings. The time for action is already long overdue.

When the Conservatives ignored osteoporosis in their own Budget, Mr Streeting, inset, called it "a betrayal of patients".

Thousands of people with osteoporosis voted Labour because of his promise to give sufferers an early diagnosis.

Now, as the party's first Budget approaches, they're looking to him to keep his word - and to prove that this Government behaves differently to the last.