19 September 2008
A government-backed investment fund for third sector organisations has helped form the largest social enterprise consortium of its kind to provide out-of-hours health care.
Futurebuilders England has invested £500,000 into Urgent Health UK, a consortium of five organisations currently providing out-of-hours GP care in their local areas. The funds will allow the consortium to tender for contracts in other primary care trust areas.
The five social enterprises, which reinvest their profits into their environmental or social goals, are: Devon Doctors; Seldoc (Lewisham, Lambeth and Southwark); Urgent Care 24 (North Merseyside); Herts Urgent Care; and South East Health (Kent).
Dr Simon Abrams, medical director of Urgent Health UK, said: 'We have found that GPs like working for not-for-profit companies rather than commercial providers – we share a common vision of how GP out-of-hours services should be delivered and we hope to make great strides with this investment over the initial three-year period.'
Collectively providing services to more than 5 million people, the group hopes to be able to offer care to an additional 300,000.
Futurebuilders chief executive Jonathan Lewis said the consortium had 'grasped a changing environment and adapted quickly to it'.
David Stout, director of the primary care trust network at the NHS Confederation, said that the social enterprise model was looked upon as 'quite favourable' in areas where GPs had opted out of providing out-of-hours care. 'Designed to be not-for-profit, with surpluses made reinvested in the service, in theory this should be quite an effective way of providing care from a commissioning perspective,' he said.
On the size of organisations providing this kind of service, he said there was often a balance to be struck between 'critical mass' and being 'local and responding to specific need'.
Stout said social enterprises were in a minority in terms of health care providers but were becoming less unusual. Measures outlined in Lord Darzi's review of the NHS were likely to remove barriers for the expansion of social enterprise in health care, he added, citing the transfer of pension rights for staff moving to a new provider.
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