02 June 2000
On this occasion the proposal comes not from the government, but from the NHS Confederation, which represents health service managers. The move to transfer provision from local authorities to its members would, it said, provide 'seamless care' and stop the elderly going into hospital 'unnecessarily' and ensure they can be discharged quickly.
Stephen Thornton, chief executive of the confederation, said: 'Twenty years of trying to achieve seamless services for older people have failed the individual. Frontline staff are struggling to provide those services.'
But Sir Jeremy Beecham, the chair of the Local Government Association, responded quickly, saying such a move would be 'a mistake, both in practical and philosophical terms.
'It would remove another area of public administration from effective democratic control and move it into a bureaucracy.'
PFjun2000
