Key NHS reform "failing to deliver"

By Tim Castle

LONDON (Reuters) - Family doctors have been paid nearly 100 million pounds in incentive payments to adopt a key National Health Service reform that has failed to improve services or save money, a health think-tank said on Thursday.

The King's Fund said progress on introducing practice-based commissioning -- which allows GPs to use local health budgets to arrange new services -- had been slow since it began in 2005 and was stalling completely in some areas.

"The policy has so far proved to be an expensive investment that has delivered little in terms of better services for patients or financial savings for the NHS," it said in a report.

It said an urgent overhaul of the policy was needed and said the lessons had not been learned from the Conservatives' similar experiments in the 1990s with GP fundholding.

"The government must tackle waning enthusiasm among GPs if it is to build on the limited progress the scheme has made," it added.

The Department of Health said it was committed to making the policy a success and that the number of GPs adopting it was increasing.

Practice-based commissioning, under which GPs are effectively given budgets to buy services for patients, is one of the cornerstones of Labour's health reforms in England.

It is designed to allow family doctors create better services for patients and at the same time, because they are working within a budget, deterring them from overwhelming popular hospitals with demand for certain treatments.