Commenting on the Prime Minister's announcement that NHS England
is to be abolished, Nuffield Trust Chief Executive Thea Stein
said:
“Today's news will be devastating for staff at all levels of NHS
England, and we must remain mindful of the human cost of this
decision. With the public finances under extraordinary pressure
it does, however, make sense to remove the duplication and
bureaucracy that exists currently – and patients and the public
are probably not going to shed many tears over the shifting of
power from an arm's-length body into central government.
“But profound problems facing the NHS remain: how to meet growing
patient need in the face of spiralling waiting lists and how to
invest in care closer to home with the NHS's wider finances
already underwater and social care reform in the long grass. It
is not immediately clear that rearranging the locus of the power
at the top will make a huge and immediate difference to these
issues, which ultimately will be how patients and the public
judge the Government.
“Furthermore, the Government should be careful that this doesn't
lead to even more top-down micro-management of local services
from Whitehall, which has been the bane of the health service.
NHS England was set up to take the politics out of the NHS, but
today politics has taken out NHS England.”
