Costly hospital mergers have not delivered solutions to failing trusts, says report

The NHS in England has spent £2bn (€2.74bn; $3.06bn) on 12 hospital mergers over the past five years that have largely failed to resolve the problems they were intended to deal with, a report from the King’s Fund has found.

The report from the healthcare think tank1 found that most of the £2bn committed by the Department of Health to initiate the mergers had been spent on tackling historical debts and covering deficits and capital investment rather than on delivering the service changes required to make the merged organisations sustainable.

The report analysed 20 mergers of NHS trusts and foundation trusts undertaken from 2010 to 2015 and found that …