Hewitt puts job on the line in defence of NHS reforms
Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, has put her job on the line over the National Health Service’s finances and pledged to press ahead with market-based reforms. The reforms might seem to be going “too far and too fast”, she said, but were “absolutely necessary” and “the only route to safeguard the NHS”.
Her pledge to press ahead came as it emerged that hundreds of jobs are likely to be cut from NHS Direct, the flagship telephone and web-based helpline as competition from others for services it hoped to provide threaten to plunge it into a deficit later this year.
At the same time, North Staffordshire NHS Trust said it was to cut 1,000 jobs from its 7,000-strong workforce to help balance its books.
Ms Hewitt accepted that “there will be more turbulence, more disquiet and more criticism” as the reform programme, which includes paying hospitals by the number of patients they treat and giving patients more choice, gathers pace.
She argued that staff could be shed without affecting care through the more efficient use of resources and that the government’s reforms “actually give the hospital more incentives to improve patient care and value for money”.
The NHS finances, heading for a £790m overspend on the latest available figures, had to be got right, she said. This will be her first year in full charge of the money “and I know I will be judged on this by the people”.
She pledged that the coming financial year would be the last when underspending organisations had their surpluses taken off them to bail out overspending ones.
She said the current year was “pivotal in the development of the NHS. The year we change it for good, the year we solve some of the long-term problems”.
The lesson of recent history was that “New Labour can never be bold enough when it comes to reform of the public services”. The reforms, she said, “are not the cause of the financial overspends in the NHS. Our reforms are designed firstly to illuminate the problems, hitherto hidden in dark corners and secondly to put the problems right”.
Patient choice was already delivering shorter waits for diagnosis and private sector provision had contributed to waiting times for cataract operations tumbling. “We have a clear choice for the NHS – leave it alone and watch it decay; or hold steady with the reforms and watch it prosper.”
She also disclosed that choose and book, the IT system that helps with choice, has achieved almost 250,000 bookings – the number it should have reached in December 2004 – and will be handling 1m of the 13m first outpatient appointments a year by August.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9daac9ea-b5e4-11da-9cbb-0000779e2340.html
Her pledge to press ahead came as it emerged that hundreds of jobs are likely to be cut from NHS Direct, the flagship telephone and web-based helpline as competition from others for services it hoped to provide threaten to plunge it into a deficit later this year.
At the same time, North Staffordshire NHS Trust said it was to cut 1,000 jobs from its 7,000-strong workforce to help balance its books.
Ms Hewitt accepted that “there will be more turbulence, more disquiet and more criticism” as the reform programme, which includes paying hospitals by the number of patients they treat and giving patients more choice, gathers pace.
She argued that staff could be shed without affecting care through the more efficient use of resources and that the government’s reforms “actually give the hospital more incentives to improve patient care and value for money”.
The NHS finances, heading for a £790m overspend on the latest available figures, had to be got right, she said. This will be her first year in full charge of the money “and I know I will be judged on this by the people”.
She pledged that the coming financial year would be the last when underspending organisations had their surpluses taken off them to bail out overspending ones.
She said the current year was “pivotal in the development of the NHS. The year we change it for good, the year we solve some of the long-term problems”.
The lesson of recent history was that “New Labour can never be bold enough when it comes to reform of the public services”. The reforms, she said, “are not the cause of the financial overspends in the NHS. Our reforms are designed firstly to illuminate the problems, hitherto hidden in dark corners and secondly to put the problems right”.
Patient choice was already delivering shorter waits for diagnosis and private sector provision had contributed to waiting times for cataract operations tumbling. “We have a clear choice for the NHS – leave it alone and watch it decay; or hold steady with the reforms and watch it prosper.”
She also disclosed that choose and book, the IT system that helps with choice, has achieved almost 250,000 bookings – the number it should have reached in December 2004 – and will be handling 1m of the 13m first outpatient appointments a year by August.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9daac9ea-b5e4-11da-9cbb-0000779e2340.html
posted by Dr Search- Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic at
8:55 AM
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