GPs ‘should be able to run local hospitals’ as part of the reforms to the NHS, the health secretary has said.
During a speech at NHS Confederation Expo conference on Thursday, Wes Streeting said the NHS ‘should not be bound by traditional expectations of how services should be arranged’.
He argued that acute trusts should be able to provide primary care services if this enables them to meet patients needs ‘in a more integrated way’, and that ‘successful GPs’ should be ‘able to run local hospitals’.
He said: ‘I am open to our strongest acute trusts providing not just community services, as they already do, but also primary care, whatever services will enable them to meet the needs of their patients in a more integrated way.
‘And likewise, there is no reason why successful GPs should not be able to run local hospitals, or why nurses should not be leading neighbourhood health services.’
He also said that ‘no one part of the NHS has a monopoly on good ideas’ and added that where providers are delivering ‘excellent care for patients at good value for taxpayers’, and where those providers ‘want to widen the pool of patients they care for’, then the Government ‘will encourage it’.
Mr Streeting said that thanks to the investment announced by the chancellor in yesterday’s spending review the NHS ‘will receive thousands more GPs to help build the neighbourhood health service’.
He also stressed the need for a radical reform of the NHS, adding that the publication of the Government’s 10-year plan for health, expected next month, will bring the ‘era of top-down control to an end’.
He added: ‘The 10-year plan will introduce incentives, freedoms flexibilities, and freedom from central control for local providers delivering a quality service.
‘We will also change the financial rules of the game, so foundation trusts can only succeed if they collaborate with community and mental health providers and GPs, focus on outcomes not activity, drive the left shift, and help to improve population health.’
Last week, NHS England said that the 10-year plan will be ‘GP-centric’ but that it will not come with huge shifts of funding from secondary to primary care immediately.
However, NHS England’s CEO, Sir Jim Mackey, said that the plan would also have neighbourhood care as a ‘big standout’ part of it, but that the health service should not worry about who controls neighbourhoods.
As well as the upcoming 10-year plan, the health secretary has also committed to a ‘refreshed’ NHS workforce plan this summer.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse.
