Yesterday I drew some political lessons from the Hinchingbrooke takeover. Today I want to draw some lessons from the procedure that has taken so very long to come to a conclusion.

I think it’s pretty certain that over the next few years there will be a variety of different takeovers and mergers of NHS hospitals. When these have been carried out in the past they have been mainly attempts to reduce costs by forcing several organisations to merge. Most of these would not have been mergers or takeovers in any other industry or service. In the NHS mergers have usually brought together 3 failing hospitals to create a single, large, failing hospital.