Hospital management committee
Hospital Management Committees were established as the main instrument for the local management of hospital services of the National Health Service in England and Wales under the National Health Service Act 1946.
There were originally 377 committees which were answerable to the 14 regional hospital boards. Each HMC was responsible for a group of around 10 functionally-related or locally grouped hospitals. The aim was that each hospital group should be able to provide all services which would be available at a large general hospital, and might therefore consist of, for example, a former voluntary general hospital, a municipal general hospital, a maternity home, an isolation hospital, as well as several other smaller hospitals. The service was planned so that patients could be treated in the hospital best suited to their medical needs. Mental hospitals were grouped under their own HMCs. The 36 large teaching hospitals were outside this structure; they maintained their own endowment funds and their old boards of governors, who reported directly to the Minister for Health, rather than a Regional Hospital Board.
The National Health Service Reorganisation Act 1973 replaced the system of Regional Hospital Boards and Hospital Management Committees with regional health authorities in 1974.