Heart expert sounds alarm over ‘horrific’ threat to NHS

Former York cardiologist Professor Roger Boyle said the plans will increase costs, create more bureaucracy and destroy key relationships that make the health service work.

He attacked Health Secretary Andrew Lansley for ignoring the NHS’s past successes in his bid to open it up to private contractors.

Prof Boyle, who had been widely credited with leading a transformation in NHS heart and stroke care in the 11 years until he stepped down this month, added: “If the market was going to work, the Americans would have cracked it.

“My 91-year-old American mother-in-law has to fill in a 150- page form each year for her health insurance and then more forms each time she makes a claim.

“I favour evolution, not revolution. We could have got to the same point without this huge disruption.

“Everything has effectively stopped (while the reforms are thrashed out) except the focus on saving cash it is very unsettling,” he said.

Prof Boyle described Mr Lansley’s modernisation plans as “the ideas of one man acting without an electoral mandate”.

“Where is the evidence that competition between commercial providers makes a blind bit of difference to cost efficiency and quality?” he added.

“The competition I want to see is between clinicians vying with each other over whose service is the best. I absolutely think the NHS is the best public service in the world. It is horrific that its future is threatened.”

Health Minister Simon Burns said: “Modernising the NHS will both safeguard the future of our health service, and will deliver a world class health service that puts patients at the heart of everything it does.

“Choosing to ignore the pressures our NHS faces threatens the very values we hold so dear – of a comprehensive health service, available to all, free at the point of use and based on need and not the ability to pay. We will not allow that to happen.”