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David Oliver: The NHS doesn’t need more “restructuring”

People are fond of saying that the NHS needs some sort of radical overhaul. On 25 June the Conservative leadership candidate Boris Johnson said that it “needs reform,” as it was “not getting the kind of support and indeed the kind of changes and management that it needs.”1 The perils of constant structural reorganisation have been described beautifully in the Nuffield Trust’s Doomed to Repeat report.2 Politicians and lobbyists never learn.

Weeks before, Kate Andrews, associate director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), had asserted on Jeremy Vine’s BBC show that the NHS was falling behind other systems and needed structural reform. The link was tweeted by the IEA, saying that “we really, really, really need to structurally reform the NHS.”3

Andrews has made numerous broadcast appearances making the same arguments, but the IEA’s ideological opposition to the NHS model,4 its small state, pro-market view of public services, …