NHS reforms likely to cost up to £3bn with no guarantee of improved performance

"I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country." Donald Berwick, MD, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The radical reorganisation of the NHS in England is likely to cost between £2bn and £3bn to implement with no guarantee that it will improve performance or lead to better care for patients, warns an expert in an editorial published on bmj.com.

Kieran Walshe, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Manchester Business School says that there is very little evidence that past NHS reorganisations have produced much, or any, improvement, and argues that the new government “looks likely to make all these mistakes again.”

Few NHS reorganisations have been properly evaluated, writes Walshe, but a recent National Audit Office study of over 90 government reorganisations found that, despite huge costs, the benefits were unclear, the process was often poorly managed, and that its impact on performance was often adverse.

Oops.