24.09.14
Healthier Together consultation extended
Healthier Together announced yesterday that the consultation on its radical review of NHS services in Greater Manchester has been extended for another three and a half weeks in an effort to get more responses.
Originally scheduled to close at the end of September, the consultation will now go on until 24 October.
The consultation has been accused of mismanagement poor planning from the start – it has been running over the summer, which is against government recommendations for consultations, and when it was originally launched the consultation documents weren’t ready so they had none to distribute.
NHE has been told that Healthier Together originally set a target of 50,000 responses for the three-month consultation, but at the three-quarter mark last week, they had so far managed to achieve 8,500. Greater Manchester has a population of 2.7 million, and these changes will affect the vast majority of them.
A senior executive at a trust that would be affected by the changes told us the consultation process had been a “complete mess”. At a recent public event where 50 people turned up, not one had a positive thing to say, with common complaints being the consultation document was “confusing” and reads like the decision has already been made.
Local MPs have been lashing out about it since the start. David Nuttall, Conservative MP for Bury North, does not believe the consultation has been a democratic process and says the consultation document is full of “gobbledegook”.
Lisa Nandy, Labour MP for Wigan, told NHE: “It’s the lack of democracy. Information is not forthcoming, decisions are being made behind closed doors and there is a real lack of accountability in the whole process. Ask people on the street what they know about the ‘Committee in Common’ and you won’t get much more than a shrug of the shoulders. Yet these are the people who will be taking decisions which will impact on everybody in the Greater Manchester region’s lives at some point.”
It should be noted that no one has disagreed with Healthier Together in the need for change in Greater Manchester’s NHS services. But the only other point everyone agrees on is that Healthier Together has not put enough thought into their recommendations.
Earlier this month NHE’s Sam McCaffrey took an in depth look at Healthier Together.
Tell us what you think – have your say below or email [email protected]