A “new relationship between the NHS and the voluntary sector” is required in order to provide the most effective healthcare, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham is expected to say today at chief executives body Acevo’s Health and Social Care Conference.

Burnham will say that the NHS must become “a service for the whole person”, and that the voluntary sector will be crucial to these plans.

“The time has come to reset the NHS for the 21st century as a service for the whole person,” Burnham will say.

“Achieving whole-person care will require radical new thinking and a new relationship between the NHS and the voluntary sector.”

Burnham will say he believes that the NHS must form “long-term trusted partnerships” with voluntary sector providers, rather than offering “one-off short term contracts”, and that the NHS must understand that the voluntary sector “can provide things the NHS cannot”, such as day-to-day personal support.

“For too long, informal carers have been taken for granted and invisible to the system,” he is expected to say. “The voluntary sector has been left to work in isolation from the NHS, filling in the gaps.

“This approach will no longer do.

“The NHS will not succeed if it tries to go it alone. In the voluntary sector, it has a partner that shares its people-not-profits ethos.

“The time has come to make this partnership work better for the wider common good.”

Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, is expected to argue that strong political leadership is necessary to ensure that NHS reform works for citizens rather than large private sector contractors.

“Successive governments have failed to understand commissioning, and have failed create a system in which a diversity of health providers can flourish,” he will say. “The impact on our hospitals continues to be grave.

“The politician that leads on an agenda which enjoins the voluntary sector with the NHS will hold the key to saving our NHS.”