Amanda Pritchard resigns as NHS boss

Amanda Pritchard is resigning as chief executive of NHS England, after three years in the job. Pritchard’s announcement, in the last few minutes, is not a huge surprise given there had not been a great deal of confidence among ministers and aides in the leadership of the NHS – though it is worth pointing out that this lack of confidence was not solely focused on Pritchard.

Pritchard had been very anxious to show that she was ready and willing to implement the reforms that Labour wanted to introduce, particularly the shift from acute, hospital-based care to preventive and community services. But she seemed to suffer from the same affliction as ministers of not knowing how to turn the tanker around, even if they all knew where their ideal destination was.

Pritchard was not like her predecessor Simon Stevens, who was a very political manager. She was easier to corner, as we saw in 2022, when the then chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced in his autumn statement that Pritchard had agreed that the money he was allocating to the NHS was ‘sufficient’. Along with other NHS colleagues, she became anxious in autumn 2023 that Rishi Sunak would list the NHS as one of the other outdated institutions that the Conservatives should tackle. She had overestimated Sunak’s ability to stick to a theme, though, as he quickly moved on from his conference speech.

Labour politicians had been careful not to push for Pritchard to go, but there had been a clear sense that Wes Streeting and his colleagues wanted a shake up of the hierarchy at NHS England. The announcement last week that Dr Penny Dash is the government’s preferred candidate for chair of the organisation shows a desire to push ahead with reforms. 

But Pritchard’s departure does leave Streeting and colleagues more exposed: if they manage a shake-up of the hierarchy to get reformers in place, then they need to know what reforms they want. It wasn’t just Pritchard who was confused about how to turn around the tanker: we still have no sense from ministers that they know how to do it either.