Ideology may have created it ? ideology of the purest, most saintly kind ? but it won’t be ideology that saves the NHS. It will be management ? creative, inspirational management that we somehow have to free from burden of decades of ideology, from left and right. Boring really. The FT reports on a really exciting experiment in freeing the surgeons and carers to provide more choice for patients. The experiment aims to get surgery patients operated on sooner by offering them a choice of hospitals ? using capacity more efficiently, basically. An important early lesson:
“It has also produced some uncomfortable lessons for an NHS that is still short of doctors, nurses and operating theatres. It has shown that real choice for patients will be possible only if there is spare capacity – some of which is likely to be permanently underused”