13 January 2006
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has acknowledged that cuts in primary care services are now creating a 'real problem' for social services departments.
The issue was first exposed in Public Finance in November when local authorities and patient groups accused their local PCTs of 'redefining' health care needs to pass responsibility for patients with long-term conditions to social services departments.
'It is a real problem, it's one that we're looking at at the moment in the [joint health and social care] white paper,' Hewitt told a seminar of health and social care leaders this week.
In some areas the issue was coming to a head as PCTs looked to make urgent savings by shutting community hospitals, said Hewitt.
In some cases, moving patients from PCT-run community hospitals to home care was justifiable in terms of best practice, said Hewitt.
'But we need to be very careful about the criteria that are being applied to those decisions,' she said.
Hewitt said that the white paper would address the issue through the creation of more opportunities for joint commissioning and pooled budgets.
But David Rogers, chair of the Local Government Association's community wellbeing board, told PF that existing shared funding mechanisms were compromised by the fact that NHS bodies are accountable to the Department of Health. DoH instructions to make savings thus forced PCTs to renege on local agreements, he said.
PFjan2006
