IN an interview on 31st May 2014 in the Daily Telegraph, Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, signalled a change of thinking on centralisation, ahead of a major speech. He said, "The NHS must stop closing cottage-style hospitals and return to treating more patients in their local communities". Mr Stevens warned that British hospitals have become among the worst in western Europe at caring for local populations, because too many services have been stripped out and centralised. He said Britain must learn from countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States, which have pioneered ways of bolstering community care around small hospitals to meet the needs of their populations. A number of other countries have found it possible to run viable local hospitals serving smaller communities than sometimes we think are sustainable in the NHS, And in an earlier speech on 1st April 2014, Simon Stevens said, "Viable local hospitals that dont all have to be huge partly because of different choices about where and how doctors are trained. Mental and physical health, unified"