Could Manchester pioneers save NHS?

[Northerner]

Greater Manchester will begin taking control of its health budget from April, after a devolution agreement was signed by the Chancellor, George Osborne.

Richard Humphries, assistant director of policy at think tank the King's Fund, sets out the fundamental points of how the new system is set to work.

What is being proposed?

At the moment, decisions about what kinds of health and social care services are available - or commissioned - are split between:

local authorities - for social care and public health
clinical commissioning groups - for hospitals, community health and mental health services
NHS England - for primary care and specialised services
The idea is to bring together the separate budgets for all of these services - £6bn in total for Greater Manchester - and give these to a new body covering the whole of the area.

Its job will be to make many major decisions about the future of services across the area.

This is likely to mean that most health and care services - hospitals, community health services, primary care, social care and mental health services - will be commissioned within Greater Manchester.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31747149

 

[KookyCat]

Well I'm not a fan of this at all, they already have control of a good proportion of the budget and surely this will just increase the postcode lottery for services? We already have difficulties diabetes wise here because of the very high number of patients and suffer for it with long waiting lists, restrictions on needles, meters and strips and no chance of a pump unless you're on the brink of death. There isn't any more funding so the only way they can divert funding into areas of concern is to rob from another. It's not the central government forcing cuts in diabetes care it's the CCG so any guesses which of us will be clobbered? One medical professional actually said when I discussed education courses with him (they offer type 1 education but they are three consecutive days during working hours) it wasn't worth the money to buy in courses that are more flexible because uptake is low, therefore people aren't interested and there are so few of us it doesn't make economic sense. They're not popular because how much time can you really take off for a condition you're trying to convince an employer has neutral impact? I've had four appointments in two months already so yeh I'll ask for three days off, it's clear we are not high on the agenda.

 

[grovesy]

I too don't think this will be that succesful!