Hospitals and GPs set for seven-day working

The health service “needs to offer greater customer convenience” by running throughout the week, the NHS Commissioning Board said.

The organisation, set up under the Government’s controversial NHS reforms, today also announces new GP-led clinical commissioning groups will each get the same 2.3 per cent rise which it claims is a real-term increase although it is less than inflation currently and less than a 2.8 per cent rise for the NHS in 2012-13.

In a report, the board says the move to seven-day working by hospitals and GP practices is “essential” and will improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs.

Chief executive Sir David Nicholson said: “People wait less, they are diagnosed and referred quicker and our hospitals have fewer infections. But everyone in the NHS knows we must continue to improve.

“There are big challenges, not least the financial backdrop, but we must be ambitious. We want to make the NHS the best customer service in the world by doing more to put patients in the driving seat.

“At the heart of our approach is local control over decision making. We want to put power in the hands of clinicians who know their patients best. We want to give them the money, information and tools to do the job.”

Sir Richard Thompson, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said hospital care at weekends needed to improve.

“Patients deserve the best care in hospitals in the evenings and at weekends,” he said.

But British Medical Association chairman Mark Porter said the guidance was “extremely ambitious... particularly at this time of major structural change and continuing financial pressure”.

“While we are committed to improving services at weekends and in the evenings, today’s proposals to provide routine NHS procedures seven days a week are too crude and fail to take into account the resources, investment and flexibility that will be needed,” he said.