Competition is holding back quality improvements, says NHS boss

New laws promoting competition in the health service in England may need to be rewritten because they are hampering efforts to improve services, the outgoing chief executive of the NHS has warned.

Speaking at a seminar hosted by the Health Service Journal, David Nicholson said that the new rules enshrined in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 had led to specific cases where efforts to reconfigure and improve services had been blocked.1

He said that examples were emerging of unintended consequences of the law changes and that the government may need to make further changes to ensure that the act’s true intent remained …