Lansley is washing his hands off of the NHS, he basically cannot be bothered to be responsible for anything that involves work. One of the ways that he will do this is creating a super-quango called the NHS Commissioning Board. According to Alisdair Stirling in
Pulse:
But Dr Jenner believes it will have to be big. ‘It will need quite a lot of regional offices. Apart from managing at least 500 consortiums they have the other 5% of things consortiums don’t do. My guess is that there could be 30 regional offices but it could be more.’
Hardly a cost-saver, but then none of this is about saving
us any money, it is all about Lansley selling off anything that isn't nailed down. Worryingly:
In common with other boards, the NHS Commissioning Board is likely to have a chief executive and executive directors as well as a chair and non-executive directors. This means the likely involvement of the Appointments Commission and a possible way in for the private sector in non-executive director roles.
So the private sector will be in charge of the privatising. I guess that makes sense.
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Since there are approximately 8,000 GP practices in England at least 500 consortiums will be probably needed to performance manage them. Hence one objective of the NHS Commissioning Board is to oversee the privatisation of the 10 Strategic Health Authorities and the 152 Primary Care Trusts which currently perform this role. Such a move is consistent with tory core policy of “rolling back the state” i.e. replacing the public sector with the private sector so that the taxpayer funds the latter’s profits.
ReplyDeleteThe NHS Board will take on commissioning roles like maternity (which GPs regard as bizarre) and for tertiary services like transplants and some cancer care. The NHS Board also has to divvy up the £80bn budget to the GP consortia, and also they are responsible for the estimated 5% of the budget that already goes to pay for GPs and their surgeries.
ReplyDeleteTo be able to do any of that in a way that reflects the local health economy, the NHS Board will have regional offices. Let's see, what about one regional office per 5 million people? Oh, it looks like Lansley has re-invented the SHA.