In 2006 the English government reversed its previous opposition to competition in health care and introduced a policy to promote competition among hospitals in the National Health Service. A system known as ‘Chose and Book’ was introduced, which gave patients choice of location for hospital care and provided information on the quality and timeliness of care. Prices, previously negotiated between buyer and seller, were set centrally under a DRG type system. In this paper we exploit this policy experiment to examine the impact of competition on clinical quality. The introduction of patient choice should increase the elasticity of demand faced by hospitals, thereby increasing competition. In addition, the move to a regulated price environment restricted competition to non-price dimensions of service. This should also increase competition over quality. Our research design exploits within hospital variation in competition before and after the policy change and utilises the fact that competition in hospital services is possible in some areas and not in others because of geography. Using this design, which overcomes the potential endogeneity of measures of hospital competition post policy, we examine a wide range of measures of clinical outcomes, measures of access and measures of throughput. We use the universe of inpatient discharge data from the National Health Service in England for the period 2003-2008, comprising data on approximately 200,000 discharges per year and 324 hospitals. We find that the effect of competition is to improve quality and save lives. Hospitals that faced increased competition after the reform reduced their mortality rates relative to those that did not. We do not find that access, as measured by waiting times, improved. Hospitals facing increased competition reduced their lengths of stay. Since clinical quality improved and length of stay fell, the policy led not to a ‘quicker and sicker’ regime, but appears to have increased quality and reduced costs per patients.