Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
With less than two weeks to go before clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) take responsibility for almost all our healthcare, they still don't know officially whether they will be free to go on commissioning work from NHS hospitals, or whether they will be forced to open it up to private providers.
They thought they did know. Former health minister Andrew Lansley wrote to them in February last year to say: "I know many of you have read that you will be forced to fragment services, or put services out to tender. This is absolutely not the case. It is a fundamental principle of the [Health and Social Care] Bill that you as commissioners, not the secretary of state and not regulators, should decide when and how competition should be used to serve your patients' interests. The healthcare regulator, Monitor, would not have the power to force you to put services out to competition." Nothing ambiguous about that.
But last month his successor Jeremy Hunt published regulations that seemed to say exactly the opposite. CCGs would have to invite tenders for virtually everything, except in an emergency when there was no time to tender. There was an immediate outcry, with a record 354,000 signatures to a petition calling for them to be rewritten. In a move reminiscent of the famous "pause" in the passage of the original bill, Hunt withdrew the regulations for some rapid redrafting.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/new-nhs-lawyers-not-gps-driving-seat
They thought they did know. Former health minister Andrew Lansley wrote to them in February last year to say: "I know many of you have read that you will be forced to fragment services, or put services out to tender. This is absolutely not the case. It is a fundamental principle of the [Health and Social Care] Bill that you as commissioners, not the secretary of state and not regulators, should decide when and how competition should be used to serve your patients' interests. The healthcare regulator, Monitor, would not have the power to force you to put services out to competition." Nothing ambiguous about that.
But last month his successor Jeremy Hunt published regulations that seemed to say exactly the opposite. CCGs would have to invite tenders for virtually everything, except in an emergency when there was no time to tender. There was an immediate outcry, with a record 354,000 signatures to a petition calling for them to be rewritten. In a move reminiscent of the famous "pause" in the passage of the original bill, Hunt withdrew the regulations for some rapid redrafting.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/new-nhs-lawyers-not-gps-driving-seat