Following Andrew Lansley’s announcement last week that he will be cutting a number of NHS quangos including the Health Protection Agency (HPA) I have spent some time thinking about what can be done to stop these agencies reinventing themselves.
For this is actually one of the biggest challenges that the Government faces. As I have already commented, the Food Standards Agency have been the first organisation to get the better of the politicians.
To enable the Health Secretary to counter the appeals that are going to come his way he only really has to look to the market. For example one of the responsibilities of the HPA is to collect statistics on Healthcare Acquired Infection, well, Dr Foster does that, and much more, far better and has been doing so for many years. If NHS trusts want to attract custom from the commissioning GPs and from consumers (patients!) they will quickly learn to publish the information that people are interested in. It’s called marketing! The HPA also provide infection control advice put again, private companies have been doing this for years and can be contracted by commissioning GPs as and when required.
The message to Mr Lansley is simple. You have lost the first round to the FSA. Don’t let the rest of these state funded bodies follow in their wake. Be ready, be ruthless and make the NHS Reforms worth much more than the paper they are written on!
This story about filthy and dangerous NHS hospitals has really gained momentum over the weekend. What is really bad news for the government is that not only is this is not a one off rogue trust, but that many of our hospitals are in this state and the problem has only been accurately identified by the private sector in the form of Dr Foster.
For me it is not surprising that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) managed to rate many of these Trusts as “good” and then for Dr Foster to obtain more accurate results. I have recently been in discussion with a number of colleagues about the CQC and the general opinion of them is that they are disorganised, incoherent and generally do not have a clue what they are doing. In fact when some nurses that I know asked them for an opinion they were unable to give any helpful or coherent advice.
I am sure that this story and the others like it that will follow will bring calls from interest groups for more regulation. This is the wrong way to solve this problem. There are two courses of action that must now be taken as a matter of urgency.
First, the NHS has shown that it is now failing to provide clean, safe care with monotonous regularity. All healthcare provision in the UK must be returned to the independent sector as a matter of urgency.
Second, the CQC has demonstrated that it is incapable of making accurate assessments of the state of our hospitals so why not abolish it immediately and let the public rely on more respected and reliable brands such as Dr Foster and Which to inform then of the true state of healthcare provision.
The only way forward is for less regulation from government and more market forces and self regulation.
