The UK health secretary has promised to cut long hospital waiting times back down to the NHS 18-week target via financial incentives and performance league tables.
In a speech at the NHS Providers conference in Liverpool, Wes Streeting said there will be a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for failure and underperforming hospitals will no longer be rewarded, with a ban on senior managers receiving pay rises at these Trusts.
Under the plans, ‘persistently failing’ NHS managers will be replaced and ‘turnaround teams‘ sent to support improvement, Mr Streeting said, while Trusts deemed to be high-performing will be given greater freedom over funding to invest where they see fit, such as modernising buildings, equipment and technology.
Meanwhile, NHS England will carry out a review of hospital performance across the country, resulting in a league table that will be made public and regularly updated.
The Government is hoping that keeping hospitals to account financially will reduce waiting times for patients.
Mr Streeting said: ‘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. We will drive the health service to improve, so patients get more out of it for what taxpayers put in.
‘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.’
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said: ‘While NHS leaders welcome accountability, it is critical that responsibility comes with the necessary support and development.
‘The extensive package of reforms, developed together with Government, will empower all leaders working in the NHS and it will give them the tools they need to provide the best possible services for our patients.’
The NHS Oversight Framework, which sets out how Trusts and integrated care boards are best monitored, will be updated by the next financial year ‘to ensure performance is properly scrutinised’.
However, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has warned that league tables and incentivising hospital performance could ‘take away focus from deeper systemic issues affecting urgent and emergency care’.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the RCEM, said: ‘Measuring poor performance is challenging as hospitals have been merged into multi-site Trusts. For example, you might have a Trust that runs multiple emergency departments, and this can be difficult to compare. That is one of the reasons we are asking for data for each individual hospital to be made available. This would easily create the transparency that the secretary of state desires.
‘There is also the risk of short-term target chasing instead of focusing on wider systemic issues needed such as improvements in social care capacity, crumbling estate and poor IT.
‘We know that A&E staff are already working at maximum capacity in extremely challenging conditions, and we are worried this focus on performance could lead to recruitment and retention issues in already struggling hospitals.‘
He added: ‘We welcome to focus on giving more power to local health boards, but no amount of performance incentive can replace the need for more beds and staff. We hope these changes will be accompanied by the whole system improvements promised by the new Government.‘
Further plans to be put forward for consultation in the coming weeks include stopping NHS staff resigning and then immediately offering their services back to the health service through a recruitment agency.
The consultation will also include a proposal banning NHS Trusts from using agencies to hire temporary entry level workers in band 2 and 3, such as healthcare assistants and domestic support workers.
The Labour Party’s manifesto had pledged to ‘cut NHS waiting times’ with ‘40,000 more appointments every week’, including via greater use of the private sector.
At the Labour Party conference September, Mr Streeting announced a ‘Formula 1 pit stop’ strategy for UK operating theatres to tackle waiting lists in areas with the ‘highest numbers of people off work sick’.
A version of this article was originally published by our sister publication Pulse.
