Those of us who fought hard against the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 (and I did, most especially on Twitter) always knew the danger within that Act.
Clause 1 said:
But then this was added:
That section changed the whole focus of the NHS. The Secretary of State might still be responsible to parliament, but operationally they had the obligation to devolve power to others, who would be autonomous.
So, hospitals would be autonomous.
And physical and mental health would be autonomous.
As would primary and secondary care which would be separately managed.
The ambulance service was unrelated to the rest of the healthcare system.
Social care might as well have been on another planet.
And in a structure where everyone was autonomous, managing to meet their own budget constraints without incentive or concern to consider others, it was inevitable the system would collapse as a result of this deliberate fragmentation.
That collapse has now happened, as those who campaigned a decade ago thought likely.
What is happening in the NHS is not an accident. It was done by design. And Andrew Lansley, the architect of this failure, sits in the House of Lords, no doubt happy with his handiwork.
But given how so very obviously the NHS was destroyed, isn’t the direction of travel – which has to be towards re-integration – now obvious?
This was shared from Richard’s excellent blog.
