And still they proliferate: this week's addition to the swelling ranks of NHS organisations is Voice, the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health. Voice will spawn local versions of itself to report patients' concerns to strategic health authorities.
Hearing Voices looks set to become a major occupational hazard for NHS managers if proposals in the Department of Health's 'listening' document, Involving Patients and the Public in Healthcare, published on Monday, are eventually adopted. You have six weeks to respond - which presumably is why this is a 'listening' and not a full-blown consultation document, on which a minimum of 12 weeks' deliberation is stipulated.
In its ever more frantic struggle to replace community health councils, the government has now ditched health select committee chair David Hinchliffe's patient council model, which it gratefully seized during the passage of the legislation before the bill was aborted by the general election. The new junior health minister, Hazel Blears, a former CHC chair, has paid greater attention to the fate of displaced CHC staff than anyone in the DoH when abolition was announced without warning in the NHS plan.
But though many, perhaps most, would find it a relatively easy transition into one of the new local Voice organisations, the resulting structure is byzantine.
Effectively co-ordinating patients' and the public's views across the different organisations which make up local health economies would be nigh impossible. And the biggest weakness is that people would simply fail to understand it. When should they contact the local Voice as opposed to the patient advocacy and liaison service, the patients forum, the Commission for Health Improvement or the health service ombudsman?
Ironically, none of this mess would have arisen had the government consulted CHCs on their replacement before the NHS plan was published. The best solution now would be if the resounding message from the 'listening' exercise was to stick with the idea of the patient council.
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