Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Yesterday I remarked on the distance between the Prime Minister’s narrative for the Health and Social Care Bill and the content of the actual Bill itself. I said that whilst it is essential for the Government to try and develop a narrative that can describe the Bill, the crucial thing is for the narrative to encompass the real content of the Bill – and not a fantasy. Read the rest of this entry »

So how does this simplification look in respect of commissioning?

If you are a Tory MP you will look back to July 2010 and remember a White Paper which rang out loudly with some important truths about getting rid of bureaucracy in the NHS. At the time the Government was announcing its revolutionary plans to reform the NHS. Whilst no-one, including Tory MPs was too clear about what health care problem the reforms were meant to solve, they were at least clear that they wanted to remove layers of bureaucracy form the NHS. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s Health Select Committee report makes an important case against the Government’s NHS reforms. It argued that the reform programme has and will act as a diversion from the main task of improving value for money for the health service. Read the rest of this entry »

As I said on Monday, in a few months’ time the Government will look back at the struggle it had to get the Act through Parliament and see it as a really easy risk—free activity compared to its implementation.

By the time the Bill is passed there will be about a year left for most of its implementation to take place from 1 April 2013.

There is a lot of complex new activity to develop in that year. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Christmas I wrote a post that called into question the depth of the BMA’s love for current PCT staff. I pointed out that in their latest guidance they were extolling the virtues of current PCT staff to BMA members leading clinical commissioning groups as being the best experts in commissioning. I suggested that they were doing this because in the last couple of years they have become fearful of new private sector firms selling their services to GP led commission groups. Read the rest of this entry »

A. When they might chose to do something with which the BMA disagrees.

Over the years the BMA, like any effective trade union, has always stood up for its member’s right to make their own choices. All trades unions do this and the BMA is assisted in this role by the professional autonomy training that all doctors receive.

Whilst this is true of all doctors, it is even truer for GPs because GPs have also traditionally run their own businesses. Therefore, as small business people, it has been up to them where they get their accountancy or legal advice from. Similarly it has been up to GPs to decide whom they might employ as receptionists or nurses. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday I ran a session with about 60 people in London, all of whom were involved in the governance of NHS commissioning over the next 16 months. As you can imagine, given the confusion around who is commissioning what, there was a broad range of different organisations represented. Most of them were non-executive directors of PCTs, PCT sub-clusters and PCT clusters. This led to much jesting about whether their title would have changed at the end of the meeting from the one they had at the beginning – a whole 2 hours later. (Yes I know – what a sad world I live in where this passes for jest!) Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday I spent the afternoon working with representatives of all of the local Public Health and Health and Well-being boards in North West London.

Two interesting issues arose from this experience.

The first was that local authorities across the sub-region are dedicating developmental time and effort to the process of taking on health improvement. They all recognise that to achieve this they will need to develop their Health and Well-being boards as the forum for discussion with clinical commissioning groups. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent last Thursday at the NHS Alliance Conference and heard from GP’s own mouths where they felt they were in terms of taking on NHS commissioning. This is not a random sample of GPs but represents a part of their leadership who want to take up commissioning.

The first thing it’s important to say is how keen nearly all of them are to take on the challenge of commissioning for their patients. Most of the GPs I met understood what this will entail, recognised that it’s going to be difficult and were generally realistic about the task. But they really want to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday I suggested that sooner or later GP organisations would recognise that they have a great deal of power over the way in which the Government could carry out its policy of GP led commissioning.

It is clear that the leadership of organisations such as the NHS Alliance and NAPC really want to make GP led commissioning work. But if they were to decide that the conditions that the National Commissioning Board are now constructing for that commissioning to take place would reduce the possibility of it working they could suggest that, unless those conditions change, they would walk away. Read the rest of this entry »