By Vivienne Russell
31 January 2011
The funding for health announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review is sufficient to allow planned NHS and social care reforms to take place, the health secretary has said.
Andrew Lansley today published two government responses to Commons health select committee reports into commissioning and public expenditure.
The committee’s report on commissioning, published earlier this month, had warned that Lansley’s structural reforms to the health service meant finding annual savings of 4% from next year would be made more difficult.
In their December report on expenditure, the MPs questioned the costs of restructuring the health service and said councils would not have the level of resources to sustain current levels of eligibility criteria for social care.
Laying his responses before Parliament today, Lansley said: ‘We accept the level of challenge presented in our modernisation of health and social care but we are clear that these changes are necessary and that the funding announced during the 2010 Spending Review, coupled with more efficient delivery systems, will allow the required change to take place across the health and social care sectors.
‘The programme of modernisation we have set out is essential both to drive efficiency in the short term, and help ensure that the NHS meets the ambition to achieve outcomes for patients that are amongst the best in the world.’
Lansley’s remarks came ahead of the Second Reading for the controversial Health and Social Care Bill. The Bill puts the NHS’s £80bn commissioning budget in the hands of GP consortiums. It also transfers public health duties to local authorities, which will be required to formulate local public health strategies.
Zack Cooper, health care expert at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, said it remained unclear how giving GPs more commissioning powers would help some of the problems the government says it wants to address, such as cancer survival rates.
Cooper said: ‘Better data and better management are the two keys to NHS performance. Neither is going to be helped by shaking up the structure of the NHS.
‘It doesn't matter if there are 50 or 100 primary care trusts – or if we have strategic health authorities or not. If the NHS doesn't do a better job measuring performance and creating sensible incentives, these reforms won't succeed and, given the financial constraints the NHS is facing, success is imperative.’
