Tories to scrap health targets

12 April 2012

The Tory party has revealed plans to scrap the Government's health targets and give doctors greater freedom.

Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said the targets have "distorted the way the NHS works".

The Conservatives are preparing to make an announcement on health policy on Monday.

Mr Lansley told the BBC Politics Show the Government-set measures on waiting times had led to patients being treated according to the target rather than their needs.

He said: "The effect of it is to distort the judgments that doctors should be making and the NHS should be making about which patients should be treated first and how quickly they should be treated.

"We've reached the absurd situation where waiting time targets are being turned into a minimum wait so you've got local NHS bodies telling the hospitals that they can't treat patients before, say, 20 weeks because they can't afford to pay for it and because the waiting time target says they should be seen at 20 weeks."

Mr Lansley said the Conservatives would move to a situation where local hospitals published how long it would take to wait for a specific procedure.

He said: "They should be publishing how quickly they can see you. It shouldn't be 18 or 20 weeks, maybe it should be considerably less than that. That would be like a local contract and those local targets are more important than the national ones. One-size fits all targets aren't the right way forward.

"We need local targets which are set by doctors and hospitals and those local targets wouldn't try to say we must have an 18 week target for everywhere in the country."

Mr Lansley proposed a situation where performance is measured by looking at the long-term outcomes for patients rather than the time taken to have a procedure.

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