The National Health Service was born on 5 July 1948, created by the post-war Labour Government, but is facing its 64th birthday this week strangled by a maze of bureaucracy created by David Cameron’s Health & Social Care Act, says Labour Lead Councillor Bet Tickner, commenting on a diagram she was sent by a concerned GP contact (attached).
“The diagram still shows the present Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, which are being abolished,” she says, “but they are being replaced by four new national boards supported by a batch of senates, four co-ordinating groups at local level, and health & wellbeing boards in each local authority area .That’s before you get to the GP Commissioning Groups which in theory will control the NHS purse-strings, though they are now being forced to use Commissioning Support organisations the diagram doesn’t even show.
“It’s unclear at present whether these Commissioning Support organisations will just be like the Primary Care Trusts, resuscitated after being abolished and with a different name, or will be outsourced to management consultancy firms like KPMG. Yet they are key to decisions on what healthcare is funded for patients.
“Cameron’s Health Act deliberately failed to provide the proper level of support to GPs in taking on directly the task of funding their patients healthcare . Thus these new bureaucracies are likely to spend a great deal of time working out what gets decided where. Most of them will meet in private, so patients and the wider public, health service managers and staff, will not be aware what issues are being discussed let alone what decisions are taken.
Labour is determined that the NHS will survive this disruptive confusion of changes, costing £20 billion while funding for patient care is flat-lining. Mr Cameron’s has been a “reform” too far; the sooner the Tories are thrown out of office, the sooner Labour can begin the task of rebuilding our NHS”
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