Examination of Witnesses

Part of Health and Social Care(Re-Committed) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:00 pm on 28 June 2011.

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Dr Meldrum: Thank you for the compliment, Kevin. Obviously, speeches are a time for trying to use words effectively, but we are getting reports from people that they feel that the co-operative working that I talked about earlier, whereby you get all the people together and decide what you will do about difficult situations, is not happening, particularly in the current financial situation. That quote was in relation to the need to make or identify £20 billion of savings, rather than in the context of the Health and Social Care Bill. The need to identify those savings is leading to short-term thinking and immediate, rushed reactions that are having bad effects for staff and, consequently, for patients.

We realise that time and money are tight and that we will not be able to do everything that in an ideal world we would like to do. However, there is a way about the process, which to some extent is a legacy of the way things worked in the past, that seems to militate against good-quality planning and decision making. That is unhelpful. Of course, the only aspect of the immediate impact of the Bill is the destabilisation I talked about earlier.

There is an added aspect, although again we are grateful for some of the changes. I do not want to sound like a latter-day Oliver Twist from the BMA, always coming back asking for more. We are grateful for some of the changes that have been made, and one of them was the relaxation of the foundation trust pipeline, but even in relation to that, a lot of managers and people from hospitals who were at the conference were reporting that they still feel a pressure to meet very tight financial deadlines and financial standards, rather than focusing on patient deadlines and patient standards.