Pretty well every opinion poll shows health as one of the three or four top political issues for the British public. So an important part of the job for me is trying to keep in touch with the views of local doctors, nurses and managers – and of course with the experience of constituents as patients.

I find that the direct experience of someone who’s waited too long at A &E or a GP who talks first- hand about specific examples of unnecessary or counterproductive rules and practices gives you an insight you don’t get from statistics. The fact that my family and I have been using the Bucks NHS for more than 20 years also helps.

As a country, we spend a lot on the NHS (£109 bn for England). But the demand for health care is always increasing. In part, that’s down to scientific advance: in part to higher expectations on our part as to what is possible. Hip and knee replacements, heart bypasses and kidney transplants: once revolutionary surgical techniques are now seen as routine and available even to very elderly people, for whom it would once have been thought too risky.

Specialist drugs have enabled more people to survive more forms of cancer. Improved neo-natal care has means babies survive who only a couple of decades ago would have died. This is all reason for celebration.

Those improvements in health treatment have given millions of people a better quality of life. But of course it also has a financial cost. So what is to be done?

Some of it is hardly rocket science. We need to have a dynamic, competitive economy that produces the wealth that means we can afford to improve the NHS further. And of course we need to squeeze the greatest possible value out of every £ spent.

Other questions are more challenging. Where should we draw the line about what is offered under the NHS? Already, cosmetic surgery is subject to restrictions and procedures like tonsillectomies are offered rarely. But where do we stop? I’ve talked to anguished couples who want IVF treatment but can’t afford to go private. An inability to conceive children is not life-threatening. But it is a traumatic experience for those couples.

Another question, very relevant locally, is how we get the balance right between good services available locally and the increasing specialisation of medicine. A few days ago, I visited the new cardiac and stroke units at Wycombe Hospital.

Both patients and clinical staff told me that they were very happy with the quality of treatment there. I know too that the statistics show that your chances of surviving a stroke or heart attack are better if you can get to such a specialist unit.

For some relatively rare treatments – liver transplants, children’s heart surgery- services are provided in a handful of regional centres. That has to be right. I’d want such treatment given by doctors and nurses who specialised in that area of medicine. Ideally, each of us would like all specialist services on our doorstep. We know that’s not possible. What we do need is openness about the reasons for changes in the provision of NHS services, good clinical evidence to justify it, and plans that embrace not just hospital services but ambulance provision and community services too.