Government health reforms ‘could be harmful to hospital services’

Government plans to hand commissioning responsibility over to GP consortia could harm efforts to improve the provision of hospital services, a health think tank has claimed.

In a new report published this week, The King's Fund made a number of recommendations to ensure that changes to hospital services lead to improvements in patient care, based on an analysis of efforts to reconfigure services in south-east London.

The think tank said market forces alone will not deliver the necessary changes, adding that hospitals which struggle financially could see a decline in standards of care.

It also warns that GP consortia may be ill-equipped to provide the strong, strategic commissioning needed to reconfigure services, such as those for cancer, cardiac and stroke, across large areas.

Report author Keith Palmer, a former chair of Barts and the London NHS Trust, said: "It is vital that the health bill currently before parliament provides the right levers to drive the changes needed."

Meanwhile, an Ipsos Mori poll of British Medical Association members has found that 89 per cent of doctors believe competition between providers will cause NHS services to become more fragmented.