The fight against Britain's biggest killer diseases could be hit by NHS
plans to cut the number of dedicated teams of experts widely lauded for
their work to improve care, doctors and health charities have warned.
Hundreds of specialists in cancer,
heart disease and strokes face being made redundant as a result of the
new NHS commissioning board's decision to shrink the number of clinical
"networks" which are intended to drive up standards of treatment in
hospital and help patients affected by those three conditions.
The
board, the powerful new body that will take over running the NHS in
England from next April, has decided to replace the 28 cancer networks
and 28 combined heart and stroke networks with 12 of each. But the
successor bodies will have far fewer staff and smaller budgets than the
existing groupings of experts, which the NHS's medical director, Prof
Sir Bruce Keogh, has praised as "an NHS success story".
Full Article on Guardian Society
No comments:
Post a Comment