23 September 2005
Patient and Public Involvement forums might be reformed along very similar lines to the recently abolished Community Health Councils, health minister Rosie Winterton said this week.
'What we need to do is what's effective, and not necessarily worry about what might be seen as a backwards step,' said Winterton.
The Community Health Councils – which had powers and duties to inspect all NHS services within a strategic health authority – were abolished in 2003.
They were replaced by Patient and Public Involvement forums, attached to individual primary care, hospital, ambulance and mental health trusts and supported by the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health.
However, the CPPIH is to be abolished in 2007 and PCTs are being asked to merge to create larger trusts aligned with local authority boundaries.
Winterton, speaking at a Local Government Association conference on health scrutiny, said that the department would use its current Your health, your care, your say consultation to collect views on what PPI forums should look like after the mergers.
Groups such as the LGA want the forums to be aligned with local authority boundaries, and Winterton said: 'If that's what works effectively, I'm prepared to see that happen.'
She said that an ideal PPI forum structure would involve 'patient pathways' through a range of both hospital and primary care, rather than through individual hospitals and primary care services.
Winterton denied that such a move would equate to a U-turn. 'The new structures we have are very different from the delivery of the CHCs,' she said.
But Joy Ellery, director of knowledge governance and communications at Lewisham Hospital NHS Trust, said that such a reform risked undermining the democratic potential of PPI forums and overburdening NHS trusts with duplicated layers of scrutiny.
'NHS bodies are already scrutinised to death,' said Ellery. If PPI forums were reconfigured along local authority boundaries, they would duplicate the work of council overview and scrutiny committees, she said. 'As it is, we spend as much time telling people what we do as doing it.'
A primary care trust source also criticised the way the Your health consultation is being conducted. The DoH has not published the usual consultation document or set of proposals and is restricting participation in its five country-wide 'deliberative' events to invitation only.
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