Health check over AV splits

They will, inevitably, be placed on the backburner while David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg – who went on the same television programme yesterday to put forward contrasting arguments – try to hold a divided administration together.

These tensions are one reason why the NHS reforms have already been delayed. Andrew Lansley’s ill-judged proposals would have disintegrated, still further, if they had been allowed to dominate the AV and local election campaigns that culminate on Thursday.

Yet, when the Prime Minister picks up the pieces and looks, afresh, at the need for National Health Service efficiencies, he should, perhaps, use the experience of hospital patients in Yorkshire as a sensible starting point.

With health experts warning that financial savings is far greater than envisaged, a key area still to be adequately addressed is the disparities between post-operative care – and the number of patients who fail to make the recovery expected by both them and their surgeon.

The reasons for this are, inevitably, complex, but the issue, at the end of the day, is a fundamentally simple one: if some hospitals can excel, why do others struggle to provide acceptable standards of care?

This is one benefit of targets and performance measures that were introduced by Labour, and which the coalition is slowly stripping away. They provide a level of scrutiny and should – if used properly – enable NHS bosses, and there are enough to them, to target resources at specific areas of weakness.

If the number of readmissions is reduced, the cost benefit to hospitals could be significant – a point that Ministers need to recognise. But will this happen if sweeping financial powers are passed to GPs, and with such little accountability?

It is a question that cannot be answered with any confidence until the Government is in a position to revise its reforms – and outlines the precise level of care standards that are affordable and acceptable in these times. This will not happen, however, while Ministers are busy name-calling over, frankly, small-scale changes to this country’s electoral system that now threaten to derail the Government’s wider agenda.