300 jobs face axe in NHS shake-up

MORE than 300 health jobs across Oldham will be axed within three years under a dramatic shake-up of the NHS.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley unveiled the coalition’s plans for the most radical reorganisation yet of the health service, which will transfer responsibility for commissioning away from local administrators to family doctors.

That will allow the Government to scrap Oldham’s Primary Care Trust, the organisations that pays GPs, dentists and hospitals for the services they carry out, and along with it 310 jobs from 2013.

Mr Lansley refused to give any guarantee that PCT staff — managers and administrators — will find similar jobs in the new set-up.

The Department of Health is also expected to try to water down redundancy terms for NHS staff, a process already under way for local council workers losing their jobs. The Conservative Cabinet Minster claims he is scrapping PCTs because the system is too bureaucratic and wants GPs to have control of the budgets instead.

In a statement to the House of Commons, he outlined how he wants the plans to come into force from April 2013 and unveiled a White Paper on “liberating” the NHS that he claims puts clinicians in the driving seat on decisions about services.

MPs were told NHS staff had had to contend with 100 targets and over 260,000 separate data returns to the Health Department each year.

“We will remove unjustified targets and the bureaucracy that sustains them.

“In their place we will set out an outcomes target to set out what the service should achieve, leaving the professionals to develop how,” he added.

“We will introduce real, local democratic accountability to healthcare for the first time in almost 40 years by giving local authorities the power to agree local strategies to bring the NHS, public health and social care together.

“After a transitional period we will phase out the top-down management hierarchy including both strategic health authorities and primary care trusts (PCTs).”

GPs, working together in local consortia, would be given responsibility for commissioning NHS services. Responsibility for public health campaign, such as smoking cessation, will be transferred to local councils.

Critics claims any savings made by axing the administration staff will be cancelled out by the cost of redundancy payments and warn it is the start of privatisation of the NHS as GPs will end up outsourcing the budgetary work to private firms.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham argued there had never been an NHS reorganisation that had not cost money and diverted resources in the short-term.

He said Mr Lansley’s plans were tantamount to the privatisation of commissioning.

“Isn’t this the green light to let market forces rip right through the system with no checks or balances? Aren’t the hearts of NHS staff sinking, reading this White Paper? This White Paper represents a roll of the dice that puts the NHS at risk.

“A giant political experiment: no consultation, no piloting, no evidence. It is you at your confused and muddled worst.”

He also questioned how more than 500 GP consortia could be less bureaucratic than 152 primary care trusts.