Most of the Government’s centralised health targets would be scrapped and family doctors given the freedom to run their own budgets and decide where their patients are treated under Conservative plans released today.

Measures such as waiting times would no longer be targeted but instead the health service would be asked to focus on the outcomes it should achieve. For breast cancer, according to the Conservatives, better care would be achieved if the NHS abandoned its target of a two-month waiting time to first treatment and concentrated on improving the five-year survival rate.

The Conservatives’ health policy group will discuss with the health professions what should be measured.

At the same time family doctors would be made responsible for the individual health outcomes of their patients and they would be rewarded for their performance. To do that GPs would have greater control and influence over local services by giving them real budgets to run.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that targets were a distortion because patients were treated according to the target rather than their needs. “We have reached the absurd situation where waiting-time targets are being turned into a minimum wait so you have got local NHS bodies telling the hospitals that they cannot treat patients before, say, 20 weeks because they cannot afford to pay for it and because the waiting-time target says they should be seen at 20 weeks,” he said.

Mr Lansley said that under the Conservatives local hospitals would publish how long it would take to wait for a specific procedure. “That would be like a local contract and those local targets are more important than the national ones,” he said. “One-size fits all targets are not the right way forward.

“We need local targets, which are set by doctors and hospitals and those local targets would not try to say we must have an 18-week target for everywhere in the country.”

Under the Conservative proposals, all GPs would be given the responsibility to purchase services for their patients. Mr Lansley said: “Putting together the clinical decisions about what is right for patients with the budgetary consequences and setting those sorts of local priorities, that is the sort of thing GPs should be doing.

“They are senior professionals who are best placed to work out what is in the best interests of their patients.”

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