NHS trusts should be “turned into businesses”, a free market think tank has argued, amid Wes Streeting’s announcement of health service league tables in a bid to boost efficiency.
The health secretary has confirmed failing hospitals will be named and shamed in league tables and managers sacked if they don’t improve patient care and take control of finances.
Streeting today vowed there “will be no more rewards for failure” as he unveiled measures aimed at boosting patient satisfaction and tackling poor performance.
It comes after Chancellor Rachel Reeves used the Autumn Budget to announce a £22.6bn NHS cash boost over two years, in the biggest spending increase outside Covid since 2010
Speaking at the NHS Providers conference in Liverpool, Streeting insisted: “Today we are announcing the reforms to make sure every penny of extra investment is well spent and cuts waiting times for patients.
“There’ll be no more turning a blind eye to failure… our health service must attract top talent, be far more transparent to the public who pay for it, and run as efficiently as global businesses.
“With the combination of investment and reform, we will turn the NHS around and cut waiting times from 18 months to 18 weeks.”
But Dr Kristian Niemietz, editorial director at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), argued: “Streeting says that he wants NHS trusts to be run ‘as efficiently as global businesses’.
“There is ultimately only one way to achieve that, and that is to turn them into precisely that: businesses, which rely on patient satisfaction for their survival.”
Reacting to the announcement of league tables, he added: “These are reheated Blair-era reforms.
“In the early 2000s, the Blair government tried to shake up NHS performance by publishing ‘star ratings’ of NHS trusts that ranked them by performance, micro-managing underperforming ones, and giving high-performing ones ‘earned autonomy’.
“Those reforms had some success back in their day, but it is not quite clear what exactly Streeting’s measures would add to that now.”
The think tank has previously called for a radical transformation of the NHS, proposing it be replaced with a Social Health Insurance (SHI) system to improve UK healthcare outcomes.
A paper published in September argues that shifting to such a model, similar to the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, could bring the UK’s health performance in line with Europe.
While YouGov has previously found almost a third of Brits (29 per cent) told pollsters the NHS is worse than healthcare systems in Europe.