The Health White Paper provides challenges, risks and opportunities for better health and care service here…

But, as long as there is an obsessive focus on better health outcomes for Staffordshire people and not on artificial Health organisational issues which could re-create many smaller PCTs in all but name, the opportunities will be greater.

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Full County Council on the road visiting Newcastle Borough Council

The key changes the proposals bring are moving health commissioning responsibility from existing Primary Care Trusts to GPs and moving the budget and responsibility around Public Health to Counties and Unitary local government.

It’s bigger than it sounds. There are currently three PCTs in Staffordshire, one for the southern six districts, one for the two northern districts and one for Stoke with a combined total spend of around £1.6billion.

The County has been working in earnest for ten months to bring together community NHS services with social care services across Staffordshire.

That will mean significant improvements, efficiency wise and, most importantly, to the parity and quality of healthcare services across the whole county and the work to do that is ongoing and will be completed in the next nine months.

The demise of the three PCTs by 2013 and the move of well over a billion pound health commissioning money to doctors in the community is huge. The County already has a successful Joint Commissioning Unit which brings together the NHS and Social Care commissioning to maximise efficiencies and align much better the provision of services.

Clearly, it is important that we continue the same principles under the new arrangements. How we do that and how we can support GPs in their new role whilst ensuring the joint approach between care and health deepens has been, and will be, the subject of dozens of hours of talks.

And why does greater collaboration matter? Well, because high quality social care services prevent many people going into high cost acute services (hospitals) and also get people out faster if they are in hospital.

It’s partly about money and partly about the quality of life and future prospects for individuals. In every aspect it makes sense.

I’ll be writing far more about this whole agenda as things move on and as negotiations take place over the summer. It’s hugely important for Staffordshire and the people who live and work here. I’ll also write about the Public Health changes which, again, will potentially enhance what we are already doing around things such as obesity and alcohol abuse.

So, a very busy time which is going to get even busyer. 

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