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Health and Education

The most important thing, and our starting point in all this, is the needs of the patients themselves. Both the NHS and the independent sector treatment centres are showing that where certain kinds of, on the whole, routine operations are concentrated in a single centre, far more patients can be treated far more rapidly. That is what patients want. Of course, as we introduce payment by results, we must ensure that those system reforms work in a way that does not destabilise core services that will never be available in the independent sector—particularly, of course, accident and emergency services—and we are doing that. On training, we are already in discussion with the British Medical Association to ensure that doctors in training can receive some training at the independent treatment centres, where there are some excellent practices from which they can learn.