What a surprise

Civitas, 5 February 2009

As has been argued on this blog and in numerous other places, endless restructuring in the NHS with little if any scientific or other rationale has caused immeasurable harm and come at huge cost. And so we go again. The decision to disband the Healthcare Commission and Commission for Social Care Inspection and create a new ‘super’ regulator, the Care Quality Commission – criticised from the pages of the Financial Times to the House of Commons Health Committee – is proving both costly and hugely disruptive.

The pages of the HSJ reveal the handover is now rated ‘red risk’: 400 redundancies have come unannounced (cost: £6.1m); the complaints system is pretty much defunct; a number of projects are ‘not yet defined, resourced or initiated’, with ‘the constantly changing CQC transition programme communications team…continuing to prove difficult’. And this is to say nothing of the cost to NHS trusts, primary care trusts and social care organisations of having to gear up and register with the new regime; a regime that is replacing two that had, for what it’s worth, actually built reasonable reputations. What a waste.