Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has been quizzed by hospital staff about his plans for the NHS.

Visiting Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool on Thursday, he said he wanted to turn around the health of children, as he accused the Conservative government of going in “completely the wrong direction”.

Meeting staff, he said: “You don’t need me to tell you just how much damage has been done over the last few years in the NHS, you’re working with that every day, particularly when it comes to children.

“The more we’re looking at children, the more concerned we are about the severe impact on children.”

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who accompanied Sir Keir on the visit to the hospital, told staff: “I’ve been learning a lot in the two years that I’ve been the shadow health and social care secretary.

“I was still shocked this morning to hear someone say to me that being a child in this country is in itself a health inequality.

“It goes against everything we are or should be about as a society. You know, we are supposed to, as adults, put children first.”

The party’s plans for children’s health, including supervised teeth brushing at free breakfast clubs, were announced earlier on Thursday.

During a question and answer session with staff at the hospital, Dr Senthil Seniappan told the Labour leader he was seeing children with “serious complications” due to being overweight or obese and asked what his party would do to tackle an “obesity crisis”.

The children’s doctor said: “In some boroughs 50% of young people are overweight or obese. This is a huge problem for us now and for the future.”

Sir Keir said: “We’ve got to get in earlier. There is obvious stuff, it seems to me, like advertising of junk food, things the Government could do at the stroke of a pen which don’t cost any money, which could be done straight away.

“We need a strategy to get in there before with the prevention.

“What we knock against when we do that is people saying ‘oh, you just want the nanny state, you want to tell people what to eat’. That isn’t the case at all.”

Sir Keir asked staff for ideas on what needed to be done to improve the health service.

Respiratory consultant Chris Grime told Sir Keir patients presenting at the hospital were not cases that should be coming to an emergency department and called for more community-based resources.

He said: “There’s no service in the community for them to go to.”

Nurse Julia Roberts said there was a “postcode lottery” about what could be provided for children.

Sir Keir told staff speaking to them was “inspirational”, adding: “At 12pm yesterday I was doing Prime Minister’s Questions – I’d swap this for that any day.”

He spent the morning at the hospital, which opened in 2015 and was based on designs inspired by children.