The Darzi review distributes blame effectively

Ara Darzi’s Independent Investigation of the NHS in England does two main things.1 Firstly, it tells attentive health experts nothing they didn’t already know about the dreadful present state of the English NHS. It contains no surprises. Secondly, it’s very much about allocating blame for how the English NHS got into that state. Both of these were needed. Since the end of the covid pandemic, NHS England’s leadership has shown an unfortunate tendency to downplay and understate how bad things really are. A speech by Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s chief executive, at the NHS ConfedExpo in June demonstrated this.2 Furthermore, NHS England attempted to suggest that the service had adequate resources. This worked about as well as you’d expect: the NHS in England is currently in deficit of at least £2bn, which is expected to worsen as the current financial year continues.3 The statistics are grim, if familiar. Productivity has cratered, as last year’s Institute for Government report The NHS Productivity …