Rethink on health bill following listening exercise

The Government has announced that it will make changes to its plans to modernise health and social care, following the publication of the NHS Future Forum report.
The Forum, which was set up as an independent group in order to "pause, listen and reflect" on the Health and Social Care Bill, makes 16 key recommendations, including:
• nurses, specialist doctors and other clinicians must be involved in making local decisions about the commissioning of care – not just GPs – but in doing this the NHS should avoid tokenism, or the creation of a new bureaucracy;
• competition should be used to secure greater choice and better value for patients – it should be used not as an end in itself, but to improve quality, promote integration and increase citizens’ rights;
• the drive for change in the NHS should not be based on Monitor’s duty to ‘promote’ competition, which should be removed, but on citizens’ power to challenge the local health service when they feel it does not offer meaningful choices or good quality;
• all organisations involved in NHS care and spending NHS money should be subject to the same high standards of public openness and accountability;
• the pace of the proposed changes should be varied so that the NHS implements them only where it is ready to do so.
To ensure that Parliament has sufficient opportunity to scrutinise the Government’s changes, relevant parts of the Bill will be recommitted. Further details of this, and the amendments the Government will make to the Bill, will be set out shortly.

♦ A briefing outlining the main changes has been produced by Voluntary Sector North West. It can be downloaded via the link below.