More hospital mergers are in prospect following an announcement on Thursday that will reduce the chance of lengthy referrals to the Competition Commission and, say supporters, ensure better use of scarce NHS resources.

The extent to which competitive pressures should be allowed in the National Health Service has been among the most contentious questions raised by the health reforms implemented in April.

The CC is expected to make a final ruling next week, but its reluctance so far to sanction the merger has been viewed with alarm in the department of health and NHS England, where rationalisation of services is seen as central to hospitals’ financial and clinical sustainability as the service copes with a £20bn savings target.

But the Financial Times understands that the joint statement by the competition authorities will pave the way for Monitor, the NHS regulator, to play a bigger role in identifying competition issues at an earlier stage.

If and when these issues can be resolved, the Office of Fair Trading is likely to take Monitor’s advice that the patient benefits of a merger outweigh potential competition concerns.

Under the health and social care bill, any proposed merger involving NHS foundation trusts must be reviewed by the OFT to assess the impact on competition and whether or not the merger will be in the interests of patients.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Catherine Davies, Monitor’s executive director of Co-operation and Competition, said the Bournemouth and Poole merger had “created a great deal of noise in the system”. She conceded that the case had left people “very unsure about how the competition rules are likely to apply”.

She rejected the idea that “the rules prevent reconfiguration because if the commissioners take a decision that instead of having two providers of services in the area they just want one provider of services, it’s open to them to make that decision”.

However, when Monitor had advised the OFT on the potential benefits to patients of the West Country hospitals’ merger, it had found “they were really quite small”, she noted.

While giving no details of Thursday’s announcement, Ms Davies suggested that Bournemouth and Poole “could have identified the competition issues earlier on and thought about whether there were ways that they could merge some of their services perhaps, but not all of the services, and really working through what the rationale for patients was”.

She added: “We’d like to work with [prospective merger partners] at an earlier stage of the transaction in terms of identifying any competition issues early on.”

There was “a perception in the system that competition rules prevent services from being organised in a way that is beneficial for patients and I think that’s not the case . . . The starting point has to be, what is in patients’ interests? What services do patients need? If you use that as the guiding principle . . . then competition rules don’t get in the way.”