PCTs provider role still in doubt

27 Oct 05
Health professionals fear that primary care trusts will still lose their function as providers, despite Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's apparent concession on the issue this week.

28 October 2005

Health professionals fear that primary care trusts will still lose their function as providers, despite Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's apparent concession on the issue this week.

Hewitt told Parliament she would not now force through the change. She announced: 'District nurses, health visitors and other staff who deliver services in the community will continue to be employed by the PCT unless and until it decides otherwise'.

She said that decisions would be made locally and subject to consultation. 'This is about getting the best services for patients and users in each local area. It is not about a top-down, one-size-fits-all model,' she added.

Hewitt's statements contradict the 2008 deadline that PCTs were given to divest themselves of their provider functions and become simply commissioners.

Speaking for the NHS Alliance, which represents GPs and PCTs, Professor Chris Drinkwater said he still expected the Department of Health to pursue a policy of requiring a provider/commissioner split in primary care.

He said that he now expected the DoH to enforce the split through financial and personal incentives. 'It will be made very clear how chief executives of PCTs will get their brownie points,' he told Public Finance.

Drinkwater also said that a financial incentive, akin to those given to local councils that transfer their social housing to an arm's-length management organisation, could be in the offing.

'They can make it clear to PCTs who want to hang on to both their commissioning and provider role that they'll have to have a clear separation of money between them, that will… drive a wedge between the two, and mean that they're more likely to hive off their provider functions,' Drinkwater said.

The DoH has attempted to play down what shadow health spokesman Andrew Murrison dubbed a '90-degree turn'. 'We still want PCTs to concentrate on their key commissioning function,' said a DoH spokeswoman.

As PF went to press, health minister Lord Warner was preparing a statement fleshing out what the policy will mean in practice.


 

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