Dear Colleagues,
Well, what a fortnight, ‘things are coming fast!’
The government has announced a merger of functions of the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England. The major reforms aim to reduce bureaucracy and duplication, make savings and empower NHS staff to deliver better care for patients with more resources being put back into frontline services.
The reforms will reverse the 2012 top-down reorganisation of the NHS. As Lord Darzi’s independent investigation into the state of the NHS found, the effects of the 2012 reorganisation are still felt today, leaving patients worse off in an ineffective system.
Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, said:
“When money is so tight, we cannot justify such a complex bureaucracy with two organisations doing the same jobs. We need more doers and fewer checkers, which is why I’m devolving resources and responsibilities to the NHS frontline.”
Sir James Mackey, who will be taking over as Transition CEO of NHS England, said:
We need to bring NHS England and DHSC together so we can deliver the biggest bang for our buck for patients, as we look to implement the 3 big shifts:
- analogue to digital
- sickness to prevention and
- hospital to community
The reforms will also free up capacity and help deliver significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, which will be reinvested in frontline services to cut waiting times through the government’s Plan for Change.
For the VCSEF sector, this potentially means that there is an even greater role to play in all of the above including the implementation of the 3 big shifts.
We have numerous examples of working with communities in accessing the digital world, with prevention and community being at the heart of everything we do. This was highlighted in our recent Wolverhampton VCSEF Survey; you can still access the full report here.
The survey revealed a number of gaps which we are in the process of addressing, one of which crucially is around finance, regulation and governance. A workshop session ‘Legal, Governance and Financial Considerations for Not-for-Profit Organisations’ has been organised and will be led by Kirsty McEwen, a leading charity and not-for-profit lawyer at Higgs LLP. For more information and to reserve your place, please book here.
The VCSEF sector is full of people with the drive, desire, ability and skill to create, manage and deliver all kinds of community and voluntary services for local people. Whatever happens in the future, we will continue to be here. We are ready and looking forward to working together with our NHS and DHSC colleagues in this period of change.
Thank you,
Sharon Nanan-Sen
Chief Executive Officer