Few may mourn NHS England's demise, but what comes next is uncertain

After Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's announcement this week that NHS England (NHSE) is to be disbanded, the BBC looks at whether the changes present a new opportunity to improve patient safety within the NHS.

A hospital chief executive once described NHSE as "the biggest kiss up, kick down, organisation in public life."

The comment came to mind when Health Secretary Wes Streeting on Thursday said the scrapping of NHSE would "end the infantilisation of frontline NHS leaders."

Time and again, NHS trusts have complained about the total control that NHSE, the body responsible for the day-to-day running of the health service in the country, exerted over their actions – the lack of freedom they had to either showcase their good work or respond to particular challenges.

"You won't find many who shed a tear over its demise," said one NHS official, "but there is concern as to what the re-organisation will mean for patient care."

But for many patients who have been failed by the NHS, there is a feeling that it was always more a part of the problem than the solution.

Protecting the reputation of the NHS brand often seemed to matter more than doing the right thing. Rarely has a major patient safety failure been uncovered and proactively admitted by NHSE.

Many of the patient safety scandals – the deaths of people with learning disabilities and mental health problems at Southern Health, maternity failures in Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent and Nottingham – were only revealed after the skilled and active campaigning of grieving and committed families, who felt compelled to turn to the media when other efforts had failed.

Helen Gittos, who lost her daughter Harriet in 2014 at East Kent, is glad that NHSE is being scrapped.

"When families met with Wes Streeting to talk about maternity safety in the autumn, one of our messages was that NHSE was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

"It has been incredibly frustrating to see NHSE's response to successive reviews of maternity services. It's almost as if they haven't read the reports", she said.

The Maternity Safety Improvement Programme, led by NHSE, has not brought the kind of improvements "women and families so desperately need", she added.

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Source: BBC News, 15 March 2025