PPlog

In the media last week were many reports of older and disabled people left without care, food and medication because of Norfolk County Council’s failure to provide adequate and consistent home care services. Their explanation was that they had commissioned a new private company to deliver the services and that private company had not been able to recruit sufficient numbers of staff to carry out the work! In my view this serious failure is a culmination of many smaller failures resulting from the central government policy in the 1980s of “compulsory competitive tendering” - requiring each local authority to contract out to the private sector those services they themselves were, by law, required to provide. So, a simple appropriate example is that the Home Help Service provided directly and efficiently in one form or another by all local authority Social Services Departments then had to be contracted out to, initially, small private, unregulated companies who performe...

The following is an extract from a Department of Health letter dated 29th January, 2009 to all trusts and strategic health authorities throughout England “Responding to what really matters to patients - support for embedding involvement and engagement.  Over the last few years, the NHS has made progress towards fully engaging people in the design and delivery of services. All major policy drivers, including the High Quality Care for All, World Class Commissioning, Local Involvement Networks (LINks) and the Draft NHS Constitution, make it clear that we must carry on embedding this good practice in all that we do. The Department is currently considering how best to support the NHS and support key partners and stakeholders so that it can facilitate true patient and public empowerment across all health services” However, as we know, in Wales “patient and public empowerment” has been retained in the form of the old Community Health Councils which, in Engla...

This entry may appear to be a departure from the subjects of PPI, LINks or Disability Rights and Equality. IT IS NOT The fact that LINks, unlike its predecessors, PPI Forums and Community Health Councils, has equal legal responsibilities for monitoring local authority social work and social care in addition to NHS still hasn’t fully registered. For years - at least since the Seebohm reforms of 1970 - very many of us in professional social work had quickly recognised one of the many reasons for the ineffectiveness and failures of the system of social work in the UK and we have been pointing this out since 1970. That reason was that the local authority structure, culture and career gradings in social services departments led to social workers wanting to progress in their careers having to move into management positions. A system which remains in place today with minor financial encouragements in the last couple of years in some authorities to remain as senior practitioners. That s...

Good to report something positive here. The new website (click on the title) for our local foundation trust hospital is an absolutely amazing change from their old one. The use of videos of clinicians and staff giving information about their respective departments and specialities is excellent and a huge improvement. There are a couple of anomalies: they have no Disability Equality Scheme anywhere in sight or available and they are outside the law with this. I have pointed this out and I’m sure they will put it right (I know they do have a DES), as I’m sure they will anything else. It would be useful to compare other trust websites - I’m sure this one could constitute a good model to follow.