Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
The biggest ever push to integrate health and social care is in serious difficulty. What has gone wrong with the Better Care Fund and can it be fixed?
The difficulty stems from the fact that half of the basic £3.8bn fund, intended to support integration projects in 2015-16, has been stripped out of budgets for acute health services. The hospital lobby argued that this risked pushing providers further into financial difficulty. The government has responded with a clawback mechanism which will keep £1bn of it largely in the NHS and make it dependent on achieving locally agreed reductions in hospital admissions.
In response, David Sparks, in his first speech as the new Labour leader of the Local Government Association (LGA), told its annual conference on Tuesday: "We are seeing Whitehall trying to strangle [the fund] at birth."
The increasingly bitter tone of the dispute reflects the massive financial stress facing both the NHS and local government. It is akin to drowning sailors fighting over a lifebelt. But it is also a clash of cultures and perspectives.
http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2014/jul/10/councils-nhs-services-must-work-together
The difficulty stems from the fact that half of the basic £3.8bn fund, intended to support integration projects in 2015-16, has been stripped out of budgets for acute health services. The hospital lobby argued that this risked pushing providers further into financial difficulty. The government has responded with a clawback mechanism which will keep £1bn of it largely in the NHS and make it dependent on achieving locally agreed reductions in hospital admissions.
In response, David Sparks, in his first speech as the new Labour leader of the Local Government Association (LGA), told its annual conference on Tuesday: "We are seeing Whitehall trying to strangle [the fund] at birth."
The increasingly bitter tone of the dispute reflects the massive financial stress facing both the NHS and local government. It is akin to drowning sailors fighting over a lifebelt. But it is also a clash of cultures and perspectives.
http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2014/jul/10/councils-nhs-services-must-work-together