The government is abolishing NHS England – the national body responsible for day-to-day management of the NHS – and bringing the health service back under closer political control.
Throughout the NHS’s history there have been questions about the right level of political involvement in the service and concerns about top-down ‘micromanagement’ from Whitehall. And since the 1980s, there has been a series of attempts to split policy formulation and implementation for the NHS at the top of government.
The Health Foundation has created a ful document to analyse the history of these changes to NHS management, identify unresolved tensions that underpin them and set out implications for the latest round of reform.
In bringing NHS England back into the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), national policymakers should maintain some split between policy and management at the top of the NHS, clarify the relationship between central and local decision making and develop other routes to inject independence into the policy process.
Date: 29 August