LONDON: UK’s govt is to abolish the £200 billion NHS England to cut bureaucracy and duplication with the department of health and bring it back under govt control, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in a speech on Thursday.
Starmer said this would shift money back to the front line and bring the NHS “back into democratic control”. “That money could and should be spent on nurses, doctors, operations and GP appointments”, not on an arms-length body, he said.
“By abolishing NHS England, that will put the NHS back at the heart of govt where it belongs, freeing it to focus on patients with less bureaucracy and more money for nurses,” he explained.
The news follows the departure of senior leaders at NHS England in recent weeks, including NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard.
Health secretary Wes Streeting told the Commons that NHS England was “the biggest quango in the world” and there were twice as many staff in NHS England and the health department as in 2010 when the NHS had the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction.
“Today NHS delivers worse care for patients but is more expensive than ever before,” Streeting said. “The budget for NHS England staff has soared to £2 billion.”
“Such bloated and inefficient bureaucracy cannot be justified. Frontline NHS staff are drowning in micromanagement subjected to by vast layers of bureaucracy,” he said.
Streeting said there are 15,300 staff in NHS England and 3,300 in the department of health and social care. “Across both we’re looking to reduce the overall headcount by 50%. That will deliver hundreds of millions of pounds worth of savings.” It will mean “fewer checkers and more doers”, he said.
Integration of NHS England and his department has begun and will be complete in two years. The Tories welcomed the announcement.
But Dr Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), was taken aback by the decision which he said had been taken without consulting staff and questioned whether it had been done with proper thought.
“There have been several reorganisations of the NHS over the years and bureaucracy creeps in all the time. It is a sad state of affairs that every new govt brings changes and there is no continuity.” He agreed the NHS was in the worst state it has ever been, with long waiting times and huge patient dissatisfaction, and said workforce management was “chaotic”.
“Will abolishing NHS England resolve all this? If politicians run the NHS, that is not good news. It should be run by professionals. The issue is it never has enough money,” Mehta said.