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!
