Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Yesterday I posted the news that the voluntary organisation ACEVO had taken a complaint about the Chief Executive of Great Yarmouth and Waveney to the Co-operation and Competition Panel. ACEVO made it clear that whilst they were complaining about his behaviour, they felt he had been ‘put in a difficult position’ by the Secretary of State’s personal preference that all re-tendered work should go to his preferred NHS providers.

It is worth going through how this has happened since many PCTs will be in the process of making or remaking decisions in this area.
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On the 30^th January this year the Government set up the Cooperation and Competition  Panel to ‘ help ensure NHS funded services deliver high quality care for patients and value for money for taxpayers’

The then Minister of State for Health Ben Bradshaw welcomed the setting up of the panel and said,

“I am pleased that the Panel has now started work. With patients now able to choose their provider for NHS services, it will play a vital role in safeguarding the interests of patients and taxpayers by ensuring that competition to provide health services is fair and transparent. We know that competition helps drive up quality and improve standards in the care that patients receive…”

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A new and unexpected front opens up today, raising further questions about The Secretary of State for Health’s personal preference for traditional NHS forms of provision.

Again it makes me ask whether his personal preference is really Government policy.
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One of the interesting issues about leadership is the way in which leaders can become known not only for their own reasons for doing things, but also the reasons their allies and supporters give for their actions. This is usually under the heading of the phrase ‘by their friends shall ye know them’.

At the moment it is interesting to note who the Secretary of State has as his friends in trying to impose his own personal preference for the NHS as preferred provider on all those who commission health care for NHS patients.
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As I have said on this blog on many occasions, the reforms in the NHS are still incomplete. This means that the old culture that has run through the NHS, like names through a stick of rock, still has an enormous impact on how people make things happen. 

Given the reforms are so incomplete it is hardly surprising that, in facing the coming drop in the growth of public spending on the NHS, there are two distinct ways in which the NHS is going to try and work through it.
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