NHS targets could be lifted if the government plans to manage healthcare like a local school system.

The government is poised to drop most NHS targets next year, so health care will work the same as schools.

Patricia Hewitt, former Secretary of State for Occupational Health, is currently working on a review of the management and administration of the health care system in England, the report of which will be published in March.

Ministers expect Ms Hewitt to recommend abandoning most of the goals that health leaders and general practitioners must fulfill and giving local leaders more autonomy.

The prospect of significantly fewer targets has been endorsed by the Royal College of General Practitioners, who said many of them are “boxes that prevent GPs and our teams from delivering primary patient care.”

Last month, the chancellor and health secretary tasked Ms Hewitt with looking at how the newly created integrated care systems should work, and in particular “how to enable local leaders to focus on improving outcomes for their populations and give them more control.” give, but be more responsible for performance and costs.”

Ministers say the NHS is too centralized, with individual hospital funds and general practitioners being forced to tailor their work to dozens of different goals – 72 goals in total in the case of general practitioners.

They prefer to delegate responsibility to local managers so they can decide how best to achieve a smaller set of shared goals. “We need to start managing the NHS more than the school system,” a senior government source said.

Professor Camila Hawthorne, President of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: “GPs and our teams operate under an intense workload and pressure on staff, and the bureaucratic burden we face on a daily basis contributes to this.

“Some of the performance metrics and regimens we are currently working on may have some merit, but many of them seem like flags that keep general practitioners and our teams away from primary care for patients, so at least a drastic review of them as a whole takes practice to make sure they are proportionate and significantly reduced, allowing general practitioners to focus on the needs of patients in their areas and act in the patient’s best interests.”

She added that “a robust recruitment and retention plan to build a base of general practitioners” is needed to increase the number of general practitioners and reduce pressure on the primary health care network.

Integrated care systems bring together health care providers and communities responsible for social care to improve the transition from inpatient care to social care. NHS leaders noted that the councils now enjoy significantly more autonomy than they do.

Allies say Rishi Sunak is working on ways to make health care more efficient after being frustrated with standards falling and funding rising steadily. In the new year, he will work to achieve faster doctor visits, a reduction in unfinished elective surgeries and faster discharges of patients to social facilities so that their hospital beds can be reassigned, which in turn should reduce ambulance waiting times.

As the goals grew and grew

The published targets were first presented to the National Health Service in the 1990s and became an important part of Tony Blair’s plan to improve public services by making them more accountable.

But the explosion of goals has led to concerns that managers are more focused on achieving them than on improving overall service quality.

General practice practitioners are faced with 72 separate tasks according to the quality and results system, and each one is scored to receive a total score of 635 points. First of all, these are very specific goals, ie. B. Ensure that patients with depression are screened between 10 and 56 days after diagnosis; administration of statins to 90% of diabetics; and creating a “written personal action plan” for as many asthma patients as possible.

Although the statistics are theoretically voluntary, 97.5 percent of the workouts involve participants and the results are published in the rankings.

For hospitals, the goals are often broader, with patients having to wait no more than four hours in the emergency room and no more than 12 hours to be admitted to the hospital if necessary.

Since the pandemic, emergency care targets and ambulance waiting times have consistently been exceeded, greatly embarrassing the government.

There are specific cancer treatment goals, such as: B. Treatment of all patients within 62 days of urgent referral and appointment to a specialist within two weeks for all patients with breast symptoms.

Mental health goals include reaching at least 1.6 million patients a year for talking therapy, which, like many other NHS goals, falls short of last year’s figures.