It’s nigh on impossible at the moment to escape from news stories about the National Health Service and the current government plan to reorganise it.
It won’t have escaped your attention that health secretary Andrew Lansley has called a two month halt to the passage of the Heath Bill through Parliament to listen to the views of NHS professionals. You can find the web pages for the listening exercise here.
Reading through the Guardian Heathcare Network on the Guardian website I came across this excellent article from The Patient from Hell ‘Will Lansley consult me, the patient?’
It seems that I’m not the only person wondering how the wishes of the people who just use the NHS are going to be reflected in the upcoming changes. More specifically, I wonder how much the views of people with mental health difficulties will be considered in any future shake ups.
In the spirit of that thought, I’d like to ask for your help.
In the next issue of One in Four, out in June, I’d like to do an article about what we’d like to change about the way we receive treatment and support for mental health. Rather than focusing on what it is that we don’t like now, I’d like to pitch forward and talk about what we’d like things to be like. And I’d like to ask for your help.
If you’ve got an idea for how mental health treatment or support might be done better, put it across in no more than 200 words and send it to me at Mark@socialspider.com .
They can be big ideas, little ideas, easy to implement ideas or complete changes f policy. They just have to make it easier for people to have the best level of mental wellbeing that they can.
You can discuss your ideas here if you’d like to, but please also send them to me via email.
If your idea makes it into the magazine you’ll win a years free subscription to One in Four for either you or a friend.
How does that sound?
NHS Complaints …a solution?
The idea is that each Trust pays into an Independent Complaints Advocacy Service (ICAS) pool to fund real independency in complaints.
The way it would work is:
“Each Trust pays a sum for complaints handling, with the Trusts failing at local resolution paying in substantially more. This will have the added incentive of resolving complaints locally thus keeping the Finance Director happy, less litigation, less escalation to Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman “
The Parliamentary Health Select Committee inquiry into Complaints and *Litigation clearly shows how concerned Parliament is on escalating costs occurred by NHS of fighting failures through the courts.
*Latest Figures from NHSLA In 2009/10, 6,652 claims of clinical negligence and 4,074 claims of non-clinical negligence against NHS bodies were received by the Authority, up from 6,088 claims of clinical negligence and 3,743 claims of non-clinical negligence in 2008/09.
£787 million was paid in connection with clinical negligence claims during 2009/10, up from £769 million in 2008/09.