New health boards met with cautious optimism
pharmafile | April 16, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | NHS, king's fund
The new joined-up health and wellbeing boards have been well received by The King’s Fund, but the think tank warns that more will need to be done to strengthen integrated care.
The boards, which bring together the NHS, public health and local authorities to co-ordinate local health services, are a key plank of the Health and Social Care Act.
The King’s Fund’s ‘Health and wellbeing boards: System leaders or talking shops?’ report suggests they could be the catalyst for delivering integrated care.
The research talks of “new and exciting opportunities to join up local services, create new partnerships with GPs, and deliver greater democratic accountability”.
But it also points out that the creation of the boards alone “will not automatically remove many of the barriers to effective joined-up care”.
It calls for a stronger national framework for integrated care to be set up “with a single outcomes framework to promote joint accountability”.
The King’s Fund is also concerned that less than a quarter of shadow boards include representatives of acute providers, and recommends that local authorities must ensure these providers are involved.
“Despite the significant financial and logistical challenges they face, there is unprecedented support for closer relationships between the NHS and local authorities,” said King’s Fund senior fellow Richard Humphries, the report’s lead author.
He praised the ‘energetic and innovative’ ways in which boards are being set up, but he warned: “This is a promising start, but it is important that the pace and enthusiasm is maintained.”
The King’s Fund has previously expressed concern that the boards have ‘very limited powers’ to hold the new GP consortia, which will be responsible for spending £60 billion of taxpayers’ money, to account.
Its new research – which includes case studies on two early implementers, Lambeth and Surrey – is the result of interviews with lead officers at 50 local authority areas in England to find out how they and their partners are implementing the boards.
The King’s Fund says there is “real optimism about the prospects for success” with ‘almost all’ interviewees expecting boards to promote closer integration between the NHS and local authorities.
However, the report sounds several warning notes, which in effect boil down to the central idea that the roles and responsibilities of all new bodies have not yet been defined clearly enough.
The report finds ‘potential tensions’ between boards’ roles in overseeing commissioning and promoting integration across public health, local government, the local NHS and the third sector.
It also says shadow boards are concerned that national policy imperatives will override locally agreed priorities.
They are also “uncertain about the extent to which they can influence decisions of the NHS Commissioning Board”, it says, with fewer than one in five thinking that they will be able to do so.
Above all, the report says that sufficient time and resources must be devoted to the new boards to allow them to find their feet and provide a credible service.
Adam Hill
Related Content
A community-first future: which pathways will get us there?
In the final Gateway to Local Adoption article of 2025, Visions4Health caught up with Julian …
The Pharma Files: with Dr Ewen Cameron, Chief Executive of West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
Pharmafile chats with Dr Ewen Cameron, Chief Executive of West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, about …
Is this an Oppenheimer moment for the life sciences industry?
By Sabina Syed, Managing Director at Visions4Health In the history of science, few initiatives demonstrate …
