DAVID Cameron was left reeling yesterday after experts wielded a scalpel and “ripped the heart” out of his health plans.
The NHS Future Forum said the reforms threatened the very foundations of the NHS and demanded sweeping changes.
In a withering assessment, they said NHS staff, patients and the public had “deep-seated concerns” about the Health and Social Care Bill. And they demanded that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley go back to the drawing board.
Professor Steve Field, who led the two-month review of the proposed Bill, said the reforms must be slowed down and tighter restrictions put in place to stop creeping privatisation.
He also highlighted concerns about the lack of accountability of new GP consortia.
Labour said the findings had effectively “ripped the heart” out of Mr Lansley’s plans.
A humbled Mr Cameron will today accept some of the Forum’s recommendations. The GP consortia will be renamed Clinical Commissioning Groups and will need Whitehall permission to start up. The ConDems have also ditched the 2013 deadline for setting up the GP groups.
But opponents said the Bill was now beyond resuscitation and should be ditched completely.
The Future Forum said Mr Lansley’s plans had caused “genuine fear and anxiety” and ran contrary to the principles of the NHS constitution. It tore into Government proposals to let private firms take over huge swathes of healthcare without any control or oversight.
Prof Field said the Bill “contained insufficient safeguards” against private firms being able to cherry-pick easy services. He also raised fears about the lack of accountability of the new GP consortia.
Mr Lansley had pinpointed 2013 as the date when control of £92billion of the NHS budget would be handed over to these consortia, who will be responsible for commissioning treatment and drugs.
He also wanted to set up a watchdog, called Monitor, to “promote competition” within the NHS itself – a move that would have let private firms grab huge chunks of health care.
The Forum accepted the principle of giving doctors more control, but said the deadline for setting up GP consortia should be extended beyond 2013. It also demanded that nurses, specialists doctors and hospital clinicians have a key role in running the groups.
It said all organisations responsible for spending NHS money – including private firms – should have to publish their accounts and be accountable to a new watchdog, the Clinical Senate.
The review said: “Competition should be used to secure greater choice and better value for patients.. to improve quality, promote integration and increase citizens’ rights.”
It called for Monitor’s duty to promote competition to be “removed” and said the watchdog’s role should be to champion the rights of patients instead.
The Forum also criticised Mr Lansley for trying to escape responsibility for running the NHS.
It concluded: “We found people’s concerns to be justified. While there was never any intention to introduce a market in the style of the utilities sector into healthcare, the Bill contained insufficient safeguards against cherry-picking.
“It was not sufficiently clear that competition would only exist when it served the interests of patients not profit.”
The Forum also warned that whatever the Government did more hospitals would close.
The Prime Minister, who had to halt the Health Bill in April after a huge outcry, is now under pressure to adopt the recommendations in full.
His Deputy Nick Clegg was cheered in Westminster last night after claiming victory in stopping the worst of the NHS reforms.
He said all his key demands had been “very, very handsomely met”.
But Mr Cameron is reported to have told a group of Tory MPs who are demanding greater privatisation, that the changes “were nothing to do with the Lib Dems”.
There was also confusion on whether the PM would accept Mr Clegg’s demand that the amended Bill is returned to the Commons for fresh scrutiny.
Mr Cameron’s spokesman denied the review process was purely a political stitch-up, designed to let Mr Clegg show he is influencing Government policy, saying: “It is about getting the reforms right.”
Labour MP Grahame Morris, a member of the Health Select Committee, praised Prof Field for highlighting the Bill’s “many damaging flaws”.
Mr Morris said: “In eight weeks he has pulled apart a Bill that Andrew Lansley has been writing for seven years. The problem is if you start with a bad Bill and rush through changes to improve it, you are still left with a bad Bill.”
But there was concern about how the recommendations would work in practice and whether the ConDems would actually honour the Forum’s findings.
Dr Hamish Meldrum, head of the British Medical Association, said: “If the Government does accept the recommendations, we will be seeing a dramatically different Health Bill – one that would get us on to a much better track.”
But the unions said the recommendations did nothing to end private firms operating within the NHS.
Unite’s Rachael Maskell warned: “The pace of the privatisation of the NHS will be slowed down, but not abandoned.”
And Unison’s Dave Prentis said: “The Forum’s changes may airbrush out some flaws, but no amount of fiddling round the edges is good enough when the future of an NHS free and accessible to all is at stake.
“The Bill is beyond repair and should be scrapped.”
3Over half of voters do not trust David Cameron to keep his promises on the NHS, a poll found last night. The ComRes/ITV News survey said only 23% of the public trusted the PM to keep to his word and just 20% believed the NHS is safe in his hands.
0 评论:
发表评论