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Patient forums struggle to recruit

The deadline for new patient forums has passed, but it is unclear whether enough members have been recruited to ensure all are up and running.

As healthmatters went to press, the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health (CPPIH) was unable to confirm if each of the 572 forums – one for each trust in the country – had achieved the minimum quota of seven members in time to meet the December 1 launch date.

The CPPIH, which is setting up and supporting the forums, said a few days before the launch that 4,000 people had been accepted as forum members. By December 1 it announced ‘close to 5000’ applications, but said not all would end up being accepted.

Less than a week before the launch, healthmatters understood that a number of forums were still struggling to reach the seven member minimum, with particular problems reported in recruitment to ambulance and mental health trust forums. The patients’ forum at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS trust had only recruited one member by mid-November.

The uncertainty comes despite a three month delay in the introduction of the new arrangements to replace community health councils. There are also concerns among forum members about under-funding, a lack of control over their own budgets, no police checking of prospective members and issues of liability should they criticise trusts or individuals.

The CPPIH said it did not have a breakdown of recruitment for particular regions, forums or trusts. When asked about recruitment to ambulance and mental health trusts, a spokesman said: ‘I think the concern might be that the interest is not as good... We’ll not find the same level of interest in every trust and every locality.

Malcolm Alexander, the director of the Association of CHCs for England and Wales until its abolition at the start of this month, said that Manchester was one area experiencing ‘huge problems’ with recruitment to forums.

He said that the CPPIH had ‘done everything possible to avoid employing people from CHCs’ and had ‘actively refused’ to work with them. The abolition of CHCs is expected to cost the NHS £12m in redundancies.