Clause 21 - out of hours medical services
Health and Social Care Bill
10:30 am
Mr John Denham (Minister of State, Department of Health; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
The hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) has raised some useful points and I hope that I can deal clearly with our policy intentions. We shall address these matters in regulations made under the clause, but what we intend to do on health authority accreditation goes some way towards meeting the hon. Gentleman's concerns, although not entirely.
If a GP co-op provides out-of-hours services covering two or three health authority areas, it is obviously sensible for the health authorities to agree that one health authority should take responsibility for accrediting the service for all of the others, to avoid repetition of a bureaucratic process, and regulations will provide for that. However, we do not think it appropriate that an out-of-hours provider who is on the list of one health authority should automatically have that accreditation accepted by all other health authorities. The reason is that some out-of-hours providers are very large--some are large commercial organisations. Although legally they are single bodies, they have a fairly loose federal structure, and the quality of service can vary from one part of the country to another, even though the umbrella organisation is the same.
Thus we feel it necessary to allow a health authority, if it wishes, to choose to accredit the organisation that offers the service to patients in its area. We believe that to be the right compromise. Under these arrangements, part of a large organisation—I do not want to single out the commercial deputising organisations—would not receive an automatic right to accreditation everywhere simply because it offered a perfectly satisfactory service in one place, as quality of service varies.