Jobs to go when Shropshire’s primary care trusts are axed
Tuesday 13th July 2010, 10:27AM BST.
SHROPSHIRE’S TWO primary care trusts and the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority are to be scrapped, with the loss of hundreds of administrative posts, in the biggest shake-up of the NHS in 60 years.
All 152 PCTS and 10 strategic authorities are to be “phased out”, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has announced.
This includes Shropshire County PCT and NHS Telford and Wrekin.
The trusts were set up in 2002 in the last major reorganisation of the health service.
Between them, they employ more than 2,300 staff and provide a range of community services such as district nursing, health visiting, physiotherapy and occupational therapy.
Shropshire County PCT is also responsible for the community hospitals at Whitchurch, Bridgnorth, Ludlow and Bishop’s Castle.
Both trusts are currently looking to “privatise” services by transferring them to a social enterprise.
Implications
Last year, NHS Telford and Wrekin moved into new state-of-the-art headquarters at Halesfield.
The jobs of the vast majority of staff within the trusts are expected to be safe in the shake-up as they are directly involved in providing patient care.
Matthew James, spokesman for Shropshire County PCT, said today: “The new Coalition Government has highlighted its plans for the NHS moving forward.
“The White Paper has a significant amount of detail which needs careful consideration and the PCT will need to understand this detail and discuss the implications with its staff before making any further comment.”
Under the Government’s proposals, management costs are to be slashed by 45 per cent and up to £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2014.
Reforms also include cutting red tape and handing GPs control of their own budgets.
Primary care trusts will be stripped of their responsibilities to decide what sort of care patients will receive.
Instead, groups of GPs will take over the task, which carries an annual budget of £80 billion.
An independent NHS Commissioning Board will oversee the new regime, with local councils taking over responsibility for public health.
By Dave Morris and Sunita Patel
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Sooooo not ‘axed’ at all but ‘phased out’ and no definite news on any job losses at all?
MMM not an accurate representation of the news then is it SS?
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“Between them, they employ more than 2,300 staff”
2300 adminstrative staff???? No wonder the NHS has no money!
How many nurses do they support? How many doctors? I had no idea of the scale of these non-jobs!!!
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Many of those 2,300 staff will be directly involved in healthcare – don’t believe the Tory lies that there will be no cuts to frontline health services.
And as for the admin ‘non’-jobs – who do you think arranges all of the appointments, keeps consultants diaraies, writes correspondence for them etc? Did you think that happened all by itself?
Do you really want your GP’s surgery to be reponsible for all this? I’ve visited a number of GP’s surgeries around Telford over the years, and most are a bit of shambles when it comes to their management of appointments etc.
This is just part of the Tories’ plan to privatise our NHS, using GP’s surgeries (which are private businesses) as the vehicle for doing so.
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Peter what aload of rubbish !! The NHS needs to be run more cost effective and to have staff who are paid a silly amount of money to keep paperwork upto date , diaries etc . Wake up and move with the time if it was run more like a private bussiness then it wouldnt waste so much in staffing costs but still provide a good customer service
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John,
Many of the public service workers who carry out such work are pretty low-paid people – the idea that they’re paid ‘a silly amount of money’ is an invention of the Tory press, and you own fertile imagination.
Of course, the private sector might be able to carry out these jobs more cheaply – they could do what they usually do in such privatisations and farm out as many of the jobs as possible to cheaper locations offshore – thus protecting their profit (which, remember, form no part of the equation at present) and leaving the UK taxpayer to pick up the costs of the people thrown out of work.
Do you fancy phoning a call centre in India to get change your next hospital appointment? It’s coming!
Having worked in the public sector (unlike, I suspect, yourself), and for large multi-national companies in the private sector, I can assure you that the levels of bureacracy in the latter are far greater than the former. The evidence is there for all to see – look at Railtrack, look at the Student Loan Company, look at numerous Goverment IT privatisations over the years.
This is a recipe for disaster and will sound the death knell of the Health Service of which we should all be proud.
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The problem is that the trusts are managed by managers managing other managers. Somewhere the voice of a healthcare worker might be noticed, but I wouldn’t bet on it, Peter.
And the amount of infighting and jokeying for position to the detriment of colleagues and services is well-known.
What about the Labour lies, eh, Peter? The fact that after years of saying: “The PRH is safe” the final admitance that it wasn’t safe after all and that the so-called Tory lies were the truth?
Don’t let your memory get selective, Peter, OK?
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Wake up you idiot this is privatisation of the NHS pure and simple. GPs want to look after paper not push paper. The PCTs take this hassle from them. Don’t believe the Tory hype, they want to kill the NHS and people like you will let them.
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Well Andy – here’s a little tip. Read the article before you have your rant.
If you do you will see that a lot of those staff provide community nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy etc. I know it may come as a shock to you (and apparently the government too if you read the White Paper) but there are more than just doctors and nurses providing care and services in the NHS. Of course you think they are non-jobs because you don’t understand – allow me to expand.
There are a number of myths about the NHS – one is there are too many managers. The numbers are freely available – in 2009, 3.12% of the workforce were managers. Or – to put it another way to help out, 96.88% of the workforce were NOT managers. So any thoughts that these organisations were “top heavy” with management is rubbish. It also makes a mockery of the government saying they will slash management costs as they are not high at all.
I fear you are all going to have a nasty shock when you realise that the GPs will be buying in private companies to run their commissioning – and they have more like 15% of their staff as managers. Be careful what you wish for…
Oh and just for the record – the largest occupational group in the NHS is nursing.
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Well said Grace, i’m just surprised that your letter has not been chopped, as most of mine seem to be.
I cannot see this idea of this con/lib bunch of clowns working. Do you tell me that your average Doctors surgery have nothing better to do than to run the hospitals as well???.
All the Doctors will want is to get there own patiants into hospital as soon as they can, or should do anyway.
Who is going to be resposible for the day-to-day running of the hospitals???? I don’t think that the Doctors will have the time or the inclination.
OK, so the hospitals are top heavy with bureaucracy, but I don’t think this is the way to go, you must have someone guiding the ship not 1000 Doctors throwing in there three penneths, nothing will ever be achived except chaos.
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Well done to our new goverment to stop this vast waste of public money on jobs that dont work and only slow the system of the NHS , Its about time that we stop all this waste of money the Labour party wasted in its long (too long !!!) term in power .
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Leaving aside your party political broadcast, there’s no doubt that some elements of the NHS need to be changed. BUT – there isn’t any real detail yet in how the Government believes that this proposed shakeup will save money, streamline admin AND (crucially) maintain or improve patient care.
Don’t you think there is at least a good possibility that all that will happen is that one bureaucracy will be replaced by another? I think you have to look at this in a bit more detail before you start praising the Government for stopping “this vast waste of money…” blah blah blah.
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If it leads to an improvement in patient care, and if it leads to a reduction of bureaucratic costs, then we shouldn’t perhaps be too quick to judge.
I’m not so sure though that this would mean that ‘front line’ jobs would be protected, and I’m also not sure that the NHS would be better run by GPs who I would have thought would be overrun by by the minutiae of running these services. I have a suspicion that private companies (where the bottom line is pleasing shareholders) and consultants will be getting a big boost in business and that it’s a sort of ‘back door’ privatisation after all.
But the truth is, no-one knows do they – not even the Government.
And of course, if it goes wrong they will blame it on the very GPs that they’ve supposedly given the power to.
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Sadly Jeepers the government does know only too well what it is doing and this is the first step to privitisation.
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Well, I suspect it’s a step towards partial privatisation – or privatisation of some elements. As to where that leads to….
I’m not generally in favour of privatisation. But if the NHS is supposed to be a clinical organisation rather than a bureaucracy (and surely it should be clinically based), then it seems right to me that clinicians should run it.
At the moment they are running around trying to meet meaningless targets to please a massive army of administrators and managers whose main task is to bully people into meeting those targets (while applying more targets of their own to justify their jobs, and/or to claim financial bonuses which aren’t necessarily gained through positive medical outcomes – for example, what happened in a certain Staffordshire Trust, where people actually died.)
The problem is that while I would imagine most GPs run their own practice budgets very well (or have capable staff to do that), running the NHS itself is a whole different ball-game which I think might require all the usual financial consultants and management consultants etc etc. The old bureaucracy would just be replaced by a new one, and it might not save any money at all.
I remain sceptical about these proposals but I still think (and I am not a particular fan of the coalition govt!) that there are elements that at least deserve consideration.
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@ Phil, next you’ll be telling us that David Cameron has ordered all children under the age of 3 shall be destroyed.
Typical staunch Labour doom and gloom and with voters like yourself twisting everything its not surprising most people got fed up with the tripe and voted Tory/Lib..
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I seem to be on the same wave length as the tory’s.NHS needs to be stream lined just get ir done and lets move on.
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On the same side as the Tories?
You do surprise me Peter :)
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Andy
Eh? Did you misread who posted the last comment?
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The GPs won’t spend £80 billion and plan all the healthcare across England themselves – they don’t have the time, skills or infrastructure to do this. There are a load of private companies already queuing up to take on this commissioning role, and they will commission health care from their private sector mates.
At the same time, all NHS hospitals and other NHS organisations are effectively going to be cut adrift from the NHS – no money, no support, no planning. They’ll be left to compete on the open market with multinational corporations like United Health. The NHS is being reduced to a brand name – a logo on an appointment letter.
Add to that the £20 billion cuts (so sorry, ‘efficiency savings’) now being shoved through, and we’re looking at a catastrophic decline in the standard of patient care.
The White Paper published on Monday effectively dismantles the NHS. There are bigger issues here than supporters of different political parties scoring points off one another. The question is, do we want an NHS that’s there for us when we’re old, and safeguarded for future generations?
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I think we all realistically know that the surge of elderly that we will have in the population is most definately impossible to pay for unless we are prepared to pay more insurance.
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its sad and niave becuase PCT does prevention NHS does treatment this means stoppign all the obesitity, sex ed, cycling healthy eating work etc which is in the long run goging to cost the NHS far more
DUMB DUMB DUMB – what else would you expect from a tory though?
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i worry this means health promotion and health prevention will suffer and yet long term this is whats really needed to save the NHS money
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Election Campaign posters dont you just love them
http://yorkshireconservatives.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/poster_small.jpg
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Anybody reading this White Paper will clearly see that this will be the end of the NHS as we know it and a definitive move towards privatisation of the NHS.
Ask 100 of the general public if they think GP’s are within the NHS and I would say at least 60% would think they are. This government intends to hand over to independent business’s i.e. GP Practices £80 billion pounds!! To spend not on Health services not necessarily provided by the NHS but other independent contractors in the private sector….I fear the worst.
Ironically, the administrative, technical and engineering jobs which will bear the brunt of these 40% cuts are a consequence of Government requirements and legislation over the last 20 years. Both Acute Trusts and PCT have been required to conform to this legislation or requirements via the DoH and Strategic Health Authority, which has inevitably meant taking on additional staff. So it is a bit rich of Cameron and Brown to blame local health providers in responding to political party policy!
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The more I think about this, the more I think you’re right – surely the legislation and targets where the requirement of the government in the first place!
This is the start of the privatisation of the NHS – just think who is controlling the cash now.
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GPs spent many years training to become GPs, why would anyone think they will make great businessmen? Surely if they wished to be businessmen, capable of effectively overseeing an £80m budget, they would have spent less time at university/training to become one.
Most GPs I know, and I work with them a lot, don’t give two hoots about business and gladly give that side of their ‘role’ in private practice to those properly trained to do so. If these medical companies come in that will be money patient care will never see.
We only have to look at the USA to see that when business becomes involved the percentage share of the health budget spent on health diminishes along with health outcomes.
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