A Labour government would aim to reduce deaths from heart disease and strokes by a quarter over 10 years and see suicide figures decline within five.

The Labour leader is giving a speech on the party’s NHS policy later.

Labour’s new targets for the health service will be part of a wider package of reforms if it is elected, Sir Keir will say, with a focus on modernisation, hitting existing cancer targets, and cutting waiting lists.

He will say it is “not serious” to argue the health service’s problems can be solved with extra funding, and call for “serious, deep, long-term changes”.

More than 5,500 deaths were registered as suicides in England and Wales in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – around three quarters of which were men. Women under the age of 24 have seen the largest increase of any group since data started being collected in 1981, an ONS study found in 2022.

The Liberal Democrats are calling for a higher minimum wage for social care workers to help tackle staff shortages.

Under the party’s plans, staff would be paid at least £2 an hour more than the minimum wage – currently £9.50 an hour for over-23s.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said carers were not valued enough, and vacancies had left the NHS “on its knees”.

The government said it was working to reduce vacancies, and is increasing funding for social care in England.

The UK national minimum wage sets out the lowest amount a worker can be paid per hour by law.

The rates are decided by the government, based on the recommendations of an independent advisory group, and change every year.

More than half of frontline care staff – 850,000 workers – would see their pay improve if there was a £2 an hour uplift to the minimum wage for the sector, according to the Resolution Foundation think tank.

Care providers are demanding double the usual fees to look after thousands of people who need to be discharged from hospitals to ease the crisis in the NHS.

Care England, which represents the largest private care home providers, said on Sunday it wanted the government to pay them £1,500 a week per person, citing the need to pay care workers more and hire rehabilitation specialists so people languishing in hospital can eventually be sent home.

The rate is about double what most local authorities currently pay for care home beds, an amount Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, described as “inadequate”.

The demand comes as the health secretary, Steve Barclay promised “urgent action” with up to £250m in new funding for the NHS to buy care beds to clear wards of medically fit patients. The money will be used to buy beds in care homes, hospices and hotels where people are looked after by homecare providers, as well as pay for hospital upgrades. Stays will be no longer than four weeks until the end of March.

Thousands of NHS patients in England will be moved into care homes as part of the government’s plan to ease unprecedented pressure on hospitals.

The NHS is being given £250m to buy thousands of beds in care homes and upgrade hospitals amid a winter crisis.

The move aims to free up hospital beds so patients can be admitted more quickly from A&E to hospital wards.

Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said the announcement was “another sticking plaster”.

The plans will be included in an emergency package to be unveiled by Health Secretary Steve Barclay.

Later in the day, Mr Barclay will outline a series of measures to address pressures on the NHS, including long waits for emergency care and delays to discharging patients who are medically fit to leave hospital.

Brexit has worsened the UK’s acute shortage of doctors in key areas of care and led to more than 4,000 European doctors choosing not to work in the NHS, research reveals.

The disclosure comes as growing numbers of medics quit in disillusionment at their relentlessly busy working lives in the increasingly overstretched health service. Official figures show the NHS in England alone has vacancies for 10,582 physicians.

Britain has 4,285 fewer European doctors than if the rising numbers who were coming before the Brexit vote in 2016 had been maintained since then, according to analysis by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank which it has shared with the Guardian.

In 2021, a total of 37,035 medics from the EU and European free trade area (EFTA) were working in the UK. However, there would have been 41,320 – or 4,285 more – if the decision to leave the EU had not triggered a “slowdown” in medical recruitment from the EU and the EFTA quartet of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein.

Cases of flu have climbed quickly in the past week in England, suggesting the season has begun earlier than normal, say officials.

People may have little immunity to flu after a break from the disease during Covid pandemic restrictions.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) says hospital and ICU admissions for the respiratory disease are rising the fastest in children under five.

Hospital rates are going up among the elderly too.

It’s not clear how big a wave the UK might be in for – levels are still relatively low overall.

But health experts are urging anyone who is eligible for a flu shot to get one.

Many southern hemisphere nations have just had their most rampant influenza season for years and officials have been warning that the UK must prepare for a big, early wave of flu too.

More than 40 million people, including young children, in the UK are being offered a flu vaccine.

The over-50s and younger adults with health conditions are also being offered a Covid booster jab this autumn and winter.

Whoever becomes prime minister this week – most likely Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson – will face the most daunting in-tray of anyone in No 10 for decades. These are the pressing issues they will have to make decisions on in the coming months ahead.

Fiscal plan

Sunak has declared that fixing the economy is his priority. The Treasury is facing a £40bn black hole and the interim chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is working on a plan to make the sums add up by 31 October but this will mean swingeing cuts. A new prime minister will have to make a call on how big the cuts will be – or whether to opt for tax rises instead.

Benefits

One of the biggest decisions on this front is whether to uprate benefits in line with inflation. Most of the centrists within the party believe this is essential and that any attempt to swerve this would not get through parliament.

Public sector pay and strikes

Public sector pay is similarly problematic when it comes to inflation. Nurses, healthcare staff, ambulance drivers, teachers, train drivers, civil servants, university lecturers and many others are considering strikes this winter in the face of real-terms pay cuts. The government may have to reconsider their settlements if it wants to avoid large-scale disruption to society.

NHS winter crisis and waiting lists

The NHS is in a dire situation heading into winter with the threat of a “twin” Covid and flu season, demoralised staff and long waits for operations, GP appointments, A&E services and ambulances. A new prime minister will have to take a decision on whether NHS spending should be ringfenced from cuts, as well as how to deal with the existing pressure on services.

Energy

The government has provided energy bill support until April but now will not say how much if any subsidy it will give people after that point. There is also the threat of winter blackouts if gas supply remains tight across Europe as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. One of the first actions of a prime minister could be to announce a major energy-saving campaign – a move resisted by Liz Truss previously.

Hospitals “desperate” to free up beds could be putting patients in danger, The Independent has been told.

NHS trusts are being forced into “risky behaviours” in the push to free up hospital beds and A&E departments, experts have warned.

It comes as new data reveals that waits for ambulance crews outside hospitals hit 26 hours in September, with more than 4,000 patients likely to have experienced severe harm due to delays.

In documents leaked to The Independent, hospital leaders in Cornwall warned staff that current pressures in its emergency care system combined with ambulance delays have “tragically resulted in deaths”.

Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust and the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said in the document that ambulance delays and waits in A&E were causing a “risk to life”, and that as a result they were planning to begin discharging patients into the care of the voluntary sector.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health and social care secretary, has said Labour would abolish the cap on doctors’ pensions which he believes would reduce waiting lists “and will inevitably save lives”.

The MP for Ilford North claimed the “crazy” cap deters many experienced doctors from working late into their careers.

He told the Telegraph: “I’m not pretending that doing away with the cap is a particularly progressive move. But it is one that sees patients seen faster, and will inevitably save lives. I’m just being hard-headed and pragmatic about this.”

The lifetime pension allowance, which was frozen last year at just over £1m until 2026, is the amount that any individual can save into a pension tax-free.

A second cap applies to the amount accumulated in a pension without incurring tax.

Under current rules doctors are unable to opt out of paying into their NHS pensions even if they have reached the cap, resulting in some high-earners taking early retirement.

The large number of unfilled NHS job vacancies is posing a serious risk to patient safety, a report by MPs says.

It found England is now short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives, calling this the worst workforce crisis in NHS history.

It said a reluctance to decisively plug the staffing gap could threaten plans to tackle the Covid treatment backlog.

The government said the workforce is growing and NHS England is drawing up long-term plans to recruit more staff.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the Commons health and social care select committee that produced the report, said tackling the shortage must be a “top priority” for the new prime minister when they take over in September.

“Persistent understaffing in the NHS poses a serious risk to staff and patient safety, a situation compounded by the absence of a long-term plan by the government to tackle it,” he said.