Commenting on today's report by the Cooperation and Competition Panel's (CCP) report on Any Qualified Provider, NHS Partners Network director David Worskett, said:

"The NHS Partners Network welcomes this report which, after a long and exhaustive review, endorses the concerns we originally put forward that PCTs were in too many cases adopting practices which unjustifiably restrict patient choice and as a result lead to patients not receiving the best or most timely treatment.

"While it is patients who matter most, it is also significant that the report finds very little justification, except under extreme circumstances, for seeing the restriction of choice as an effective or sensible means of achieving financial savings in the interests of taxpayers. It is right, and in everyone's interests, that the views of PCTs should have been so fully considered before coming to these conclusions.

"The strong endorsement of the role that choice and competition has to play in driving up quality and driving down patient suffering in the NHS is a message that has been challenged in recent weeks. The Government now needs to show decisively that it means what it has said about promoting choice by actively ensuring that the CCP's recommendations are implemented effectively across England, and by hard-wiring them into the mindsets of the new NHS Commissioning Board, PCT clusters and Clinical Commissioning Groups.

"We welcome, in particular:
-  the clear guidance that imposing minimum waiting times is highly undesirable and almost always not in the interest of patients, providers or PCTs;

- the recommendation that commissioners now review their practices, with SHA oversight, to ensure they are in full compliance with the Principles and Rules for Cooperation and Competition;

- the set of recommendations aimed at achieving transparency in respect of any restrictions and guidance on commissioning of elective care;

- the clear statement that the "first best" way of managing demand, and therefore budgets, is through making the most appropriate clinical judgements about treatment.

"We note the CCP's advice to providers that they should now be willing to bring individual cases forward where commissioners appear not to have heeded the CCP's findings. That will no doubt be necessary in some instances but we are firmly of the view that this approach can be avoided, to everyone's benefit, if commissioners wholeheartedly adopt these recommendations thus making such complaints unnecessary."