Doctors set to hold NHS cash
THE new coalition government, seeking to cut a record Budget deficit, announced a radical shake-up of its sprawling health service yesterday.
The reorganisation of the world’s largest public healthcare system will see family doctors take charge of the lion’s share of a £110bn healthcare budget. Losing out will be thousands of managers in the National Health Service (NHS) whose jobs will be cut to slash bureaucracy and save money.
The restructuring of the NHS is politically sensitive, coming after a series of reorganisations which have had mixed results.
The opposition Labour party said the coalition of centre-right Conservatives and centrist Liberal Democrats was taking a “huge gamble” by giving doctors control of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
Its ideal of good healthcare available to all, regardless of wealth, still commands near universal approval and remains unchanged in the latest reorganisation.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is protecting the NHS from deep cuts sought elsewhere in government to tackle a budget deficit of around 11 per cent of GDP.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is concentrating on structural reforms he says will improve the outcomes for patients as well as saving money at a time of limited resources.
He wants patients to be able to use information about the quality of different hospitals and consultants to choose the treatment best for them.
More than 150 local health authorities in England, will be scrapped, along with ten larger regional management bodies.
Meanwhile, education secretary Michael Gove was back under the spotlight yesterday as
MPs rounded on him over allegations he was advised to delay an error-strewn list of axed school building projects.
The list was later found to contain 25 mistakes and led to 20 schools being wrongly reassured their projects would not be affected.