Citizen News
NHS Blackburn with Darwen chief’s concern as NHS axe falls
4:29pm Tuesday 20th December 2011
SIR Bill Taylor has led health chiefs in expressing ‘huge concerns’ about ‘keeping the NHS baton moving not dropping it’ after hundreds of senior figures were asked for their resignation.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s controversial NHS reforms have seen health service directors told they will have to leave their jobs by the end of the year.
In a leaked letter released by the Labour party, Sir Bill, the chairman of NHS Blackburn with Darwen Care Trust Plus, said this was distracting the NHS leadership.
In the letter to the NHS Confederation, which represents the health service’s top managers, senior executives wrote that a decision to cut both the size and number of primary care trusts (PCTs) had led to the threat of a mass clearout at board level earlier than expected.
Writing on behalf of the chairmen of NHS boards in Lancashire and Cumbria, which collectively spend £3.5billion of NHS cash, Sir Bill said: “We write to you with almost immediate urgency to express our huge concerns about the efficacy of the current proposals.”
Describing the proposals as “on the hoof arrangements” the letter warned there was “a huge potential to lose corporate memory”.
It said although they had mixed views about the Health and Social Care Bill, they were united in thinking that “long-held and cherished standards, efficiency and effectiveness” should not be put under “dire threat.”
Chairmen and directors of PCTs across England have been given pro-forma resignation letters to return by December 31, even though the Government is still months away from finding out whether Parliament has approved its planned re-organisation of the NHS.
Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, called for a halt to ‘forced resignations’.
He said: “The Government is steering the NHS towards the rocks and, unbelievably, is now busy throwing captain and crew overboard.
"It threatens to plunge the NHS into a vacuum just when it most needs experience, grip and focus.”
Primary care trusts including Blackburn with Darwen and NHS East Lancashire will fold by 2013, but it was assumed that non-executives would be on hand to ease the transition to a new system where GPs take responsibility for budgets.
The process has already seen 151 PCTs moving to 52 PCT ‘clusters’.