Health chiefs across East Lancashire forced to quit

1:23pm Friday 27th January 2012

By Neil Docking

HEALTH chiefs across East Lancashire have reluctantly agreed to resign as part of sweeping NHS reforms.

Non-executive directors at the region’s two primary care trusts (PCTs) were told they had to quit by December 31 or they would face being banned from public service for two years.

Blackburn with Darwen Care Trust Plus and NHS East Lancashire are both set to close by April 2013, with GP consortiums known as Clinical Commissioning Groups assuming responsibility for budgets and buying patient services.

But leading figures forced to leave their posts a year early fear their accumulated wealth of ‘corporate memory’, knowledge and expertise will now be lost to the NHS.

Sir Bill Taylor, a non-executive director and chairman of NHS Blackburn with Darwen Care Trust Plus, said its non-executives resisted the Government order until last week.

He said: “We were a 15-person board with eight non-executives, three of them elected members, the majority citizens of the borough, from all walks of life.

“It can’t be a financial issue because the new arrangements, with three full time doctors with offices, will cost more.”

He hoped the fact that Blackburn with Darwen had merged its health and council services, making savings in office and management, could have delayed the changes.

But he said his team had now pledged their support to the doctors taking charge.

He said: “We were on track with saving money and they’ve taken us off track while we restructure.

“We made effective savings without cutting services and now this is in the hands of a new body that hasn’t formed yet, because the Health and Social Care Bill isn’t law yet.

“But this isn’t about us – it’s about the NHS being an open and accountable organisation. The most important thing to me is how will citizens have a voice?”

Lancashire’s five PCTs have formed a cluster, NHS Lancashire, to support the transition.

Mary Thomas, one of seven non-executive directors forced to quit NHS East Lancashire, said she was concerned about how this would work.

The magistrate and development officer for Age UK said: “We’re all pretty upset about it because we weren’t consulted. None of us wanted to resign.

“We still felt we had lots of things we could do, but everything had gone to the NHS Lancashire board and we no longer had board meetings.

“I’m concerned about the risk, because we and I’m sure the directors at Blackburn with Darwen knew what the issues were in East Lancashire, if the hospitals were failing on certain things for example.”