06 August 2004
A major national initiative aimed at helping NHS trusts manage non-clinical risks in areas such as fire safety and waste management has been scrapped.
NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp announced the move to abandon the Controls Assurance programme with immediate effect this week, claiming it had become unnecessarily bureaucratic.
The project, launched in 1997 by then NHS finance director Colin Reeves, was part of the health service's response to the Cadbury report on corporate governance. Trust chief executives were required to sign a statement in their organisation's annual accounts, known as a statement of internal control, verifying its compliance with standards in 22 risk areas.
While managers support the principle of controls assurance, which help identify and tackle risks in areas as diverse as fleet management and food hygiene, there has been a growing feeling that national reporting and verification procedures are too cumbersome.
Crisp insisted that trusts would still have to perform controls assurance internally and national checking would be rigorous. Risk management through controls assurance forms part of the slimmed-down core standards published by the health department in late July. It is likely the annual accounts statement of internal control will remain.
'The decision to end Controls Assurance follows a Department of Health and Cabinet Office review. We listened to complaints from the NHS that the standards had become too prescriptive and burdensome,' Crisp said.
'The bureaucratic “tick-box” approach we currently have, where managing the process can be disproportionately more important than managing the risk, needs to end.'
PFaug2004
