Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, has today stepped up his public criticism of the Health Secretary’s ‘maladroit meddling’ in local healthcare.

Mr Raynsford was speaking following the publication of a report by the influential health research group, the King’s Fund.  Reconfiguring Hospital Services: Lessons from South East London considers whether the Government’s reorganization of the NHS will help or hinder the drive to improve standards of clinical care and patient safety.  

The report highlights the risks associated with the abolition of NHS London - the Strategic Health Authority responsible for coordinating local health reforms.  Without such a regional body, reorganisation of the NHS will be a lot more difficult to achieve without harming frontline services for patients.

The report concludes that the Government’s decision to transfer commissioning responsibility to smaller GP consortia will ‘weaken commissioning levers to effect service improvement across trust boundaries in emergency services’.  The worry is that GPs will have less expertise and commissioning experience than the current commissioning body NHS London. 

It shows that relying on market forces alone will not deliver the changes needed, with the risk that the quality of patient care will deteriorate in hospitals faced with large financial shortfalls.

The report looks at A Picture of Health as a casestudy – the name of the strategy developed to reconfigure NHS services across South East London.

The report confirms that the reconfiguration was ‘expected to deliver significant improvements in the quality of care for patients’.  This was to be achieved by consolidating emergency and maternity services, allowing an increase in the numbers of consultants and experienced doctors and nurses on duty at any one point in time. This continued with the change of role at Queen Mary’s Sidcup to concentrate on elective work, which would result in ‘markedly improved patient outcomes’.

Implementation was already underway before it was halted in May 2010 by the new Secretary of State, Andrew Lansley, who insisted on a further review of the proposal.  This was despite the strategy already having been the subject of detailed local consultation, and receiving the endorsement of the Government in 2009 following its examination and approval by the Independent Reconfiguration Panel. This not only delayed implantation of the agreed reconfiguration by six months, but also wasted a great deal of time and money on an unnecessary and unproductive review.

Nick says: ‘This report is further independent evidence that Lansley’s interference in local healthcare issues was ill-advised and wasteful.  That is why I referred the whole matter to the National Audit Office, I await the outcome of their investigation with interest.

‘His ill-considered reorganisation of the NHS just shows again that the Health Secretary is not acting in the best interests of the public, and is putting at risk the delivery of patient safety and clinical excellence’.