Number of acute hospitals in England must fall for NHS to survive, says outgoing chief

The outgoing chief executive of the NHS has called for the number of acute hospitals to shrink in the future to allow knowledge and resources to be centralised and used more efficiently.

David Nicholson said that the health service in England needed to embark on a programme of “transformational change” to frontline care to achieve better outcomes for an ageing population with a growing number of long term conditions and to avoid a potential …