NHS Alliance: Social enterprises are future of public health services
pharmafile | March 30, 2011 | News story | | NHS, NHS Alliance, NHS reforms, Right to Request, public health services, social enterprise
The NHS Alliance has once more backed the idea that social enterprise should form the backbone of public health services in future.
“A healthy social enterprise is a compromise between an NHS that is run by the state and an NHS that is run by corporations,” says the primary care organisation’s chairman Dr Michael Dixon.
In a speech at the King’s Fund today he added: “The social enterprise model provides the right bridge between cooperation and competition in the NHS.”
The NHS Alliance, which includes GP consortia, PCTs, clinicians and managers, has been quietly making this argument for more than a year and has couched it in terms designed to appeal to critics who fear a ‘sell-off’ of the NHS.
In a speech in February 2010, Dixon said this ‘third way’ actually mirrored the health service’s founding values: in 1948 Aneurin Bevan based the newly-created NHS on a coal-miners’ co-operative in Bevan’s native South Wales.
It also taps into the spirit of the times by feeding in to David Cameron’s much-vaunted “big society” idea – last August, the government called for more NHS staff to come up with ideas for social enterprises as part of its Right to Request initiative.
The idea of public sector workers taking over some of the services they deliver is an attractive one, thinks the NHS Alliance.
Co-ownership of services by professionals and local people should ensure that providers, staff and patients take on responsibility to use resources cost-effectively, it believes.
“This will be crucial in the new world where improving personal health, community health and the ability of patients to self-care may be the difference between an NHS that is sustainable or not,” he said in his speech.
“If we create an NHS where providers are encouraged to provide as much as possible and patients are encouraged to behave as consumers, then we will end up with spiralling costs,” Dixon added.
Adam Hill
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