15 February 2011
A lack of support from senior NHS managers and poor business skills among employees have been identified as major barriers to staff setting up social enterprises to run services independently.
A report published yesterday by the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham found that although staff have had the ‘right to request’ to set up their own social enterprises since 2008, take-up remains mixed.
The study, conducted in the West Midlands, found there had been ‘considerable uptake’ in around half of England’s strategic health authority areas, but in some areas enthusiasm had been more muted.
The main barriers to mutualisation were a lack of support from senior NHS managers and commissioners, the report found, while others were put off by colleagues who were loyal to the NHS or feared losing favourable terms and conditions of employment.
Many NHS workers did not have the skills or confidence to get their plans beyond the initial proposal stage.
Author Robin Miller said: ‘There is a long way to go before there is widespread unleashing of entrepreneurial clinicians who set up their own social enterprises and achieve the innovation in health care that is hoped for.
‘Perhaps the greatest challenge is enabling clinicians to see themselves as entrepreneurs and take the risks and opportunities that business will present them.’
Miller said that for take-up to increase, mutualisation would need to be promoted actively by NHS employers, and employees’ business skills should be developed as a matter of course. Social enterprises that do set up should be supported to compete for contracts, he said, and more should be done to explain the benefits to health care that could be achieved through that method.
He added that the findings had implications in the wider public sector, as ministers sought to introduce similar plans for other service areas.
