Letter

Is the government really listening?

Dear healthmatters — Thankfully, following the government’s ‘listening exercise’ on the new patient involvement structures (Voices raised over patient power, issue 45), the ideas of ‘Voices’– staff-led bodies at strategic health authority level – seems to have been dropped. The idea received widespread opprobrium, primarily for proposing the replacement of a local lay-led body, the community health council, with a remote staff-led body.

But the government is still pressing ahead with the abolition of CHCs, leaving nothing in their place. The NHS Reform and Health Care Professions Bill, currently before parliament, sets out the abolition of CHCs but puts forward no alternative body at community or local health economy level. This means that the public will lose a local health watchdog of proven efficacy and instead get a fragmented and confusing range of bodies that are structurally incapable of providing an overview of local health provision.

The proposed new structure raises the ludicrous prospect of no one body being able to reflect the whole of a patient’s experience. Many patients have complex problems involving a number of services.

For example, the elderly patient whose problems may extend from acute care, to primary care, to community care, and even to residential care. To whom do they turn if they are seeking advice, or support or some form of redress?

If the government was really ‘listening’ it would reconsider its proposals to do away with CHCs and would instead consider reforming them and putting them at the heart of the new system.