Clause 9 - Public Involvement and Consultation
Health and Social Care Bill
5:30 pm
Mr John Denham (Minister of State, Department of Health; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
We certainly have no intention to do so. We have moved away from the special health authority model. As the hon. Gentleman will know, the services provided by Broadmoor and Rampton will be provided by trusts and that is clearly the direction in which we wish to go in respect of Ashworth, too.
Our approach has been to build into the organisations that have been set up under the provisions of special health authorities their own arrangements for patient involvement. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, for example, was established as a special health authority and NICE has its own arrangement. We ensured, for example, that the partners council of NICE would have representatives of the health professionals and patients and carer interests as well as other involvement. That is the approach that we prefer to take. The hon. Member for New Forest, West asked me why we had excluded special health authorities. It is because they are not direct providers of services to patients in the same way as the other bodies that we have mentioned.