"The Forum's role in focussing attention on some of the major challenges facing the health service is welcome. Their proposals, including putting patient needs centre stage on information across the NHS, mean radical changes to the way that everyone in the NHS works.
"Public providers of healthcare - hospitals, mental health trusts, community organisations and ambulance services - will need regulators to play ball on information collection and work with the grain of these proposals. This will ease the bureaucratic burden on NHS trusts and ensure resources are not diverted from frontline care and patient services.
"On workforce education and training the Forum has taken a refreshingly localist stance which puts employers in the driving seat, by removing overly rigid national bureaucracy and ensuring greater employer involvement. The FTN called for Health Education England to be independent. We are pleased that it will be a stand alone body, so that it can work with all stakeholders to build trust in the system, and deliver through local education and training boards which will ultimately be autonomous organisations. All organisations must make a genuine commitment to train and educate the current and future workforce.
"The report recognises that integration is an approach whose time has come. It is in patients' interests to close hospital services where organisations are inefficient and not viable, in favour of supporting others to respond to the increasingly complex needs of patients who require care both in hospital and in community settings.
"Competition law will apply in the new NHS and regulators will have a tough job in supporting the implementation of competition, choice and service integration. They will need to be mature and sophisticated in they way they create and implement the public interest test when taking competition decisions.
"Local health and well-being boards have been put at the heart of integration decisions. The challenge we pose to them is to involve healthcare providers in the design phase of planning their investment. Currently there is no formal representation on for providers on health and wellbeing boards."