North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust, and East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust will face measures from April.
Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health and social care, said: ‘Right now, a cluster of high-performing trusts are masking some chronic under-performance in other parts of the country. Failure has been tolerated for too long. Staff know it. Patients feel it. And I won't stand for it.
‘We won't have succeeded in changing the NHS, until we change it for the patients who are suffering the worst services in the country.
‘In some places, so many years of poor service without improvement is feeding that sense of fatalism. They believe that after so long, it just can't get better – in fact, they've never seen it get better.
‘That's why I've announced today a new Intensive Recovery programme. This will target the worst performing providers, sending in our best leaders or delivering the structural changes necessary to get them back on track. No more turning a blind eye to failure.'
Each organisation will receive a tailored improvement approach, designed jointly with local leadership and focused on delivery, including changes of leadership where necessary.
NHS veterans with a history of success will be brought into underperforming areas, with the merging or separating of trusts where necessary so resources can be reallocated based on need and improving access to capital for crumbling estates.
Matthew Taylor interim chief executive of the NHS Confederation and NHS Providers (which from April will become the NHS Alliance) said: ‘The secretary of state is right to focus on areas of the country where performance levels are lagging. It's good to see he recognises that this is not down to poor local leadership, but instead often the result of historic structural issues that have never been properly addressed.
‘Local NHS leaders will value the Government's backing for difficult changes to local services that are required to enhance safety and improve quality of care. Too often these changes have been blocked because they have been deemed by successive governments as being too politically difficult to back.
‘We need to back local leaders to deliver these changes and continue to support and incentivise leaders to take on the most difficult NHS jobs in the country. That's why we welcome the focus of the government's new Intensive Recovery programme on improvement and support rather than naming and shaming NHS organisations.'
