NHS England to be abolished

[Chelsea2026]

Shocking news that NHS England is to be abolished by 2027 and all functions moved into DHSC!

Good. It's a quango separate to the NHS itself anyway, and the fewer quangos we have, the better.

Not sure why it’s shocking, 13000 jobs and salaries that could be put to much better use providing front line NHS services

It's not that shocking. All used to be under DHSC until approx 2011 anyway!

Let’s see what happens. Why does NHSE need a comms team when the dept of health has one and the government has one too. There’s lots of duplication. As long as they do t cut front line and direct support staff, great. They can increase staff who do checks on tourist patients. They can stop all the excessive woke crap like period advisors.

As I understand it , it was only set up in 2011 and designed to distance government from responsibility for NHS shortcomings.

I don't think anyone could argue it's improved anything, so absolutely right it should go and good that government wants to get closer and take responsibility IMO.

What do you think they do that's so valuable as to make the news shocking OP?

I heard something about this but tbh i dont understand none of it.

Could a knowledgeable person please outline the organisation's role/ whatever it is and does?

My job is one that will go as a result. 3 kids and basically on the breadline, not ideal, but I do understand the bigger picture. Also not great for those who have left stable jobs to join NHSE/ICBs who will now have to go through process all over again.

I was going to start a thread on this.
As far as I can see, it's good news. Things certainly ran better before this organisation began in 2013. As a repeated user of NHS services for both parents going back further than that, hospitalisations and treatment have been much much worse after increased bureaucracy.

I was very much under the impression that it was just an extra layer of bureaucracy and gave the impression of creating jobs. Although I could never see why the Conservatives wanted to create jobs. Was it to create wealth for all their management mates?

I would have tackled the NHS Confederation first but perhaps it will fall by the wayside naturally?

People can't have it both ways. Unfortunately, there have been several governments who have created lots of paperwork jobs. We now can't cut those without causing upset.

The complaints I've seen so far are a bit mad though. In the private sector, there is no way this would happen slowly over two years!

I no longer trust any government to use savings efficiently. But it seems like a very good step to take - to remove a layer of bureaucracy. I'm old enough to remember Gordon Brown saying that it was the job of the government to create government jobs. That actually horrified me. I suppose where we go next depends on what people believe. Some people do support that view.

Really governments should have been on top of options for natural wastage, e.g. not replacing people who retired in pointless organisations. But the only politician I have heard dare to say that recently is Liz Truss and we know what happened to her.

It will ultimately save the NHS, the question is where will all of these people now work? I am concerned it will mainly be women and office based work, of which there isn't much around as AI decides to take over this sector alongside this.

We really need to be working on paying care and social services more and valuing them (then maybe some of these would sidestep into that) and stop making nurses pay to train. Getting people into NHS is the same as teaching - if you keep paying them a pittance and giving them long gruelling hours with abusive environments that are unsafe no one is going to want to do the job. Banging on about being able to fund a measly 6k non-subject specific teachers when no one wants to stay in the profession isn't resolving the issue.

Me neither!

Please could someone explain what is happening?

Brilliant news. Now lets get rid of all the trusts etc and slim the administration/management of it back right down.

working for government is historically very stable though. My parents always wanted me to work for government and looking back at the last 30 years, I wonder if they were right. The end result would have been better although not suited to my nature.

I appreciate your balanced response and I wish you luck in your next move.

I'm glad there's a calm thread as I suspect there will be many angry ones. Already some people think it's the same as the NHS.

Supporting 50% of the population with a painful and messy bodily function isn't "woke".

It was a layer of office based workers overlooking NHS https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/what-we-do/

A bit like a middleman but under the guise of keeping up efficiency and taking away paperwork from front line staff (which I think we can see hasn't worked very well). I think there were some useful areas for research and data but I assume this is being relocated somehow as we will need continuity of statistics.

I was shocked at the headline as I thought it meant we’d all have to go private!
I haven’t been keeping up lately.

It sounds like a good move. I read on here a lot about useless higher management, people in jobs that don’t need to exist, etc.

The morale and working environment sounds hellish.

My families experience of the NHS is appalling really, we’ve all got horror stories from over the years!

@OriginalUsername2

My families experience of the NHS is appalling really, we’ve all got horror stories from over the years!

Same here, the last time we got good NHS services in our family and ability to get GP appointments was in the late 90s. All the reorganisations, initiatives, trusts, etc set up since then seem to have made things worse.

That's why I'd be glad to go back to the 90s set up in most areas of the NHS before all this fragmentation of different trusts providing different services in the same area, even in the same town/same hospital/same GP surgery.

That's exactly what you were supposed to think. The headlines are very different according to which way the publisher leans 😆

NHS England also run centralised IT services (e.g. the NHS spine which contains patient data), and runs pretty much all the education of all staff, including clinical staff across the NHS.

They also have responsibilities relating to research and actually putting together information from all the local hospitals so e.g. Wes Streeting's team can get information in a format where they can actually analyse it.

They organise the delivery of national immunisation programmes and making sure e.g. COVID vaccines are where they need to be, when they need to be.

On top of that, they, working with ICBs which are also experiencing massive cuts, work out what services need to be offered to local populations (e.g. where is big enough to need an A and E, should doctors surgeries be allowed to close or do they need to be run by someone else, where should a minor injuries unit be, where should eating disorder patients be treated) and work out how to make sure the population has access to specialised commissioning such as proton beam therapy and how to manage tertiary (super specialist) hospitals.

They also work out how much money different areas and different organisations within different areas should get - boring but someone has to do it. They make sure local pharmacies have the contracts to do our prescriptions and that we have enough pharmacies in our local areas to meet our needs.

They agree and organise care for people who need complex, long term health care but who don't need to be in hospital.

You can't procure healthcare for 67 million people without the things above being managed. And that involves back office staff.

The organisations above have already been asked to make big savings under the last government (around 20-30% by the end of 2023-24).

Another 50% will mean some services have to be stopped.

Editing to add: they also procure all the medicines used in the UK's hospitals. I'm sure I'll remember more.

Thanks @Ineffable23 sounds like a lot of it is the sort of thing that people expect magically happens on its own....?

Yup, it's boring, it's not sexy and it definitely doesn't make positive headlines. But if that stuff didn't exist then you'd have plenty more different problems that we don't have today.

I'm not saying any of them perfect, nothing is, but the fact that we've had the cut in staff numbers as the headline, before they've worked out how to restructure, tells you (in my view) that this a Political act designed to grab headlines rather than boring reform of backroom functions and then a consequential downsizing once you've worked out how you can reform them.

I don’t expect they will be stopping these activities; these things will all have been done prior to the existence of NHSE too. They are changing the structure, not cancelling everything it does.

By changing the structure, you realise they have said they want both NHS England and ICBs to halve in size? That's not just a "structure change" that is cuts. Unless you believe (and maybe you do believe it, but I certainly don't) that 50% of people at these organisations are genuinely doing pointless jobs, you can't make changes of that nature, without reducing the number of things they do.

Bear in mind they were already asked to make 20-30% savings 2 years ago. So if 100% was 2022, then you are now at 75% and then if you halve that again you're at 37.5% of 2022 levels.

Clearly staff will do their utmost to make sure delivery isn't affected but pretending that changes like this won't have an impact is absurd.

Prior to the existence of NHS England you had a larger department of health, plus Strategic Health Authorities plus Primary Care Trusts.

Same

Hopefully some of the money can be channeled towards nurses and nursing recruitment. A far better use of the money.