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NHS ‘listening’ tsar comes back with extensive rewrite of Andrew Lansley’s health and social care bill Experts recruited by David Cameron after the outcry over coalition plans to reform the NHS have recommended a series of key changes that will see the health and social care bill extensively rewritten. Prof Steve Field, chairman of the NHS Future Forum, said an overhaul of the plans was necessary after health secretary Andrew Lansley’s original blueprint to improve the NHS in England alarmed health professionals, patients and the public. He said that “the principles underlying the bill – devolving control to clinicians, giving patients real choices and control, and focusing on outcomes – are well supported”. But in remarks that underline the fear and confusion aroused by Lansley’s original bill, he added: “During our listening we heard genuine and deep-seated concerns from NHS staff, patients and the public which must be addressed if the reforms are to be progressed. Our recommendations represent important changes in future policy, crystallising those thousands of voices, as well as our own views.” The forum’s 16 recommendations include findings that: • The pace of the reforms, which had alarmed many critics in the NHS, should be varied so that the service carries them through only when it is able to do so. • The health secretary should retain ultimate accountability for the NHS in England, a responsibility that Lansley sought to abandon in his original bill. • Not just GPs but also nurses, specialist doctors and other clinicians should be involved in making local decisions about the commissioning of care – another rejection of a key element of the original bill. • “Competition should be used to secure greater choice and better value for patients. It should be used not as an end in itself, but to improve quality, promote integration and increase citizens’ rights.” • In addition, the restructuring of the NHS should be based not on the regulator Monitor’s duty to “promote” competition – which should be removed – but on citizens’ power to challenge the local health service where they do not feel their service offers meaningful choice or good quality. Field, the former chair of the Royal College of GPs, and the 44 other experts on the panel have spent more than two months talking to health professionals, patient groups and others after the bill was put on hold amid increasing political difficulty for the coalition. NHS Health Andrew Lansley Liberal-Conservative coalition Denis Campbell guardian.co.uk