The

Health and Social Care Act 2012 The Health and Social Care Act 2012 (c. 7) is an Act of Parliament (UK), act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provided for the most extensive reorganisation of the structure of the National Health Service (England), National Health Ser ...

established

NHS England NHS England, formally the NHS Commissioning Board for England, is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care. It oversees the budget, planning, delivery and day-to-day operation of the commissioning si ...

and provides that the Secretary of State is to publish, annually, a document known as the NHS mandate which specifies the objectives which the Board should seek to achieve. National Health Service (Mandate Requirements) Regulations are published each year to give legal force to the mandate.

2014-15

The mandate centred on uncontroversial ambitions: reducing rates of premature death, enhancing quality of life for people with long-term conditions, enhancing recovery.

2015-16

2016-17

There was a consultation process for the 2016 to 2017 mandate in the autumn of 2015. It was criticised as having little publicity.

2017-18

The mandate for 2017-18 centres on the implementation of the

Five Year Forward View The Five Year Forward View was produced by NHS England in October 2014 under the leadership of Simon Stevens (civil servant), Simon Stevens as a planning document. Publication and reception It received praise for brevity, being only 39 pages, a ...

. It requires NHS England to provide weekend and evening access to primary care for 40% of the population by the end of 2017-18 and sets goals to improve the performance of

Accident and Emergency An emergency department (ED), also known as an accident and emergency department (A&E), emergency room (ER), emergency ward (EW) or casualty department, is a medical treatment facility specializing in emergency medicine, the acute care of pat ...

departments with the majority of trusts meeting the 95% target in March 2018. It promises to reduce bed-blocking to 3.5%, the equivalent of releasing more than 2000 extra beds a day. This is to be achieved by NHS trusts integrating social care services for elderly patients. It includes proposals to improve the collection of data about incidence, prevalence, clinical activity and outcomes of musculoskeletal patients and services in England. Chris Hopson, Chief executive of

NHS Providers NHS Providers is the membership organisation for NHS trusts in England, which takes part in negotiations between the trusts and the Department of Health and provides development support to trust leaders. Until 2011, the body was a section of th ...

, representing

NHS foundation trust An NHS foundation trust is a semi-autonomous organisational unit within the National Health Service (England), National Health Service in England. They have a degree of independence from the Department of Health and Social Care (and, until the a ...

s responded by saying "Taken together with the other commitments set out in the document, the gap between demands on the health service and the resources available in the coming year remains unbridgeable. We maintain that just stabilising the deterioration in performance would be an achievement in itself."

References

{{Reflist NHS legislation National Health Service (England)