Yet another NHS reform !

C

CRG

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I was going to add this to the 'Beyond NICE Guidelines' thread but it likely has wider relevance:

https://www.theguardian.com/society...o-nhs-institutionalise-cronyism-claims-labour

This seems especially relevant: "Under the complex reforms, more than 200 clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will be replaced by just 42 much larger integrated care systems."

Dealing with fewer organisations might make advocacy easier, but then each one will be more remote and seem designed to be less responsive: "Ashworth also warned that the legislation as drafted does not reserve an automatic place on the new ICS boards for patient representatives ... "

The re-organisation is for NHS England only, but will likely have some impact for patients in Wales which for practical purposes has contracts with NHS England.
 
Sometimes it really.does look to me as though the NHS is being managed to fail.

Lots of time and energy for reorganising things so they aren't noticeably any more efficient than before. It seems to get harder and harder to pinpoint exactly who is accountable for what & make 'em take responsibility.

Meanwhile the staff that actually do the heavy lifting and see patients seem to have heavier workloads than ever.
 
The NHS is weird. I worked for them for 15 years and during that time they had three reorganisations, which accomplished nothing useful that anyone could see. Just a lot of disruption and extra work for everyone, shuffling things about, moving premises, job titles being changed. Colleagues who had been there longer than I had, would shrug and say to me, "The NHS does this every five years" and that nobody had been able to fathom out what the point of it was.
Invisible Woman said:
Lots of time and energy for reorganising things so they aren't noticeably any more efficient than before.
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Exactly this! So strange, and a waste of taxpayers' money to pay for all this messing about.

(Edited for typo)
 
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EzzieD said:
The NHS is weird. I worked for them for 15 years and during that time they had three reorganisations, which accomplished nothing useful that anyone could see. Just a lot of disruption and extra work for everyone, shuffling things about, moving premises, job titles being changed. Colleagues who had been there longer than I had, would shrug and say to me, "The NHS does this every five years" and that nobody had been able to fathom out what the point of it was.

Exactly this! So strange, and a waste of taxpayers' money to pay for all this messing about.

(Edited for typo)
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It's politics. To move beyond that, we need longer-term planning and policy-making for the NHS that transcends partisan politics, that allows for proper direction and which resists change for political purposes.

Otherwise, we'll always have the problem of a vast overhaul every five years as whoever's in charge uses healthcare as a political football (or as a cash cow for their mates).
 
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I found it was very similar in teaching. Every new government/Ed sec wants to radically overhaul things but they just shift things around and it rarely helps at all. The regular changes are just another burden teachers have to absorb before getting on with the actual work of educating children.
 
I'm not sure it's politics, I noticed the same when I was teaching in multi-national corporations. My students would tell me (and I was there long enough to see it for myself) - every 2-5 years there'd be a new concept and a reorganisation, trumpeted with enthusiasm by those who introduced it, met with a world-weary shrug by employees who had seen it all before. As far as I could make out it was usually a sign of someone on a career path making their mark and meeting some target or other before buggering off somewhere else to do the same thing. It certainly isn't exclusive to the NHS or the public sector, and seems common in many large organisations. It often seems to be just someone getting a little over-enthusiastic about their management career.
 
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