ISTC meltdown?
Is it time yet to say “I told you so”? Over the past year I have been engaged in a dispute with the Commercial Directorate & the Department of Health over the wishful thinking that has dominated policy. I am glad to see that some difficult decisions have been taken even though it is a year & £84 million later (ok, not all of it was spent in the last year but a large enough sum would have been).
The Director General also advised that a contract for diagnostic services in the West Midlands should be terminated. Poor take-up of the service (5 per cent utilisation to date) meant it could no longer be justified on value for money grounds. Waiting times for diagnostic treatments in the region have fallen dramatically from more than a year to three weeks since the scheme was first proposed and as a result the scheme no longer represents good value for money.
Maybe there never was demand for the service in the first place, after all a proper demand assessment was not carried out. And I do not mean to single out the Care UK deal as it is a common element across most of the contracts that I am aware of excluding certain specialised services such as Renal Dialysis. There is a lot of room for improvement in productivity of existing NHS facilities if management & financial constraints are reduced.
A new forum for independent sector providers to advise the Department on local procurement practice.
Unless membership of this forum is open to all organisations in the healthcare sector & it is not weighted towards the larger providers, is it fair?
I have a question though for the proposals to procure 100 new primary care facilities from the likes of Boots / Asda / Tesco in deprived areas. Can anyone tell me what the criteria used to designate a locality as under-doctored & in need of new private sector facilites are?
November 18th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Apropos of the above, I ran into a regional NHS bigwig at a conference before the announcement last week & we got to discussing the impending cancellations. His message was that he was pleased with the outcome as his region had only wanted a very small section of what was sought to be foisted upon them & after 3 years and a few million pounds, that was exactly what they have ended up with. I am sure that similar sentiments will emerge over the coming weeks. Neither of us were laughing at the mismanagement.