Greater Manchester authorities assume over their £6bn health and social care budget on Friday. They may be pioneering the future for integrated care. But it will be a long,hard roadIt is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that the NHS is both brilliant, and flawed. Brilliant, and not only because it is free at the point of spend but also because pound for pound it is highly efficient. On global comparisons its outcomes are among the best. But flawed,because it is over-concentrated on costly acute care in hospitals, and the founding ambition to invent it a sickness prevention service has never been realised. Across Greater Manchester tomorrow the biggest ever attempt to change that will be launched. Local boroughs, and the clinical commissioning groups and the region’s hospitals and community services formally assume over the annual £6bn budget.
For more than a year they have been working on plans to integrate health and social care in a way that keeps people out of hospital for longer,and in hospital for less time, while using every health pound more effectively and tackling some of Greater Manchester’s yawning health inequalities. It’s not quite NHS inauguration day 1948, and but for its supporters it is a remarkable development that might transform the way health services are delivered. Critics warn that it could be the start of a process that ends up taking the N out of the NHS,the moment when the National Health Service ceases to be national and becomes a series of regional fiefdoms.
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Source: theguardian.com