Health chiefs across East Lancashire forced to quit (From Lancashire Telegraph)
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Health chiefs across East Lancashire forced to quit
1:23pm Friday 27th January 2012 in Darwen
CONCERNS Sir Bill Taylor
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.
“All these people are being chucked out and it wasn’t a choice.
“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.”
Comments(25)
TONY WALES
says...
1:55pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Can somebody tell me, how much these people were paid each year?
Also, how much are they getting paid as a lump sum, upon retirement,and also what they will each be paid in pensions each year?
Then we can decide if we think they will be a great loss.
After all, my taxes were paying their wages.
By the way, they were not the people who made the porridge at Blackburn hospital, which some of the people are moaning about, are they?
kateash
says...
2:41pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
2:55pm Fri 27 Jan 12
english rose 1
says...
3:54pm Fri 27 Jan 12
*
Joke Berry the Rossendale & Darwen MP said in his election leaflets that ''we will increase spending on the NHS and make sure the money reaches where it's needed most''.
*
Yet Blackburn & Darwen NHS budget has been reduced by £6.3m in 2011/12.
*
Obviously he doesn't think the money is needed most in his own constituency !
*
One of the reasons is that this NHS shake up (which wasn't in the ConDem manifesto) will cost about £2 billion to implement ! What a waste of money !
Izanears
says...
4:13pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Sir Bill Taylor wrote:Sorry Sir Bill, but you live in cloud cuckoo land. For a start there is no need to have such a large number of people on the 'boards' and secondly, as has been shown by the closure of Burnley A&E and the probable closure of Pendle Community hospital, plus other detrimental changes I have neither the time nor space to relate, it does not matter what the public say or want, you don't take a blind bit of notice.
Before any more confused contributions get posted, a Non Exec gets less then £8k for the work they do which was publicly advertised, applied & interviewed for. They have no employment "rights" & will get no severance or pension whatsover. But how will we, the tax payer, citizen & patient have a real say in the new future when it becomes Law?
TONY WALES
says...
5:00pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Check out his web page at www.improveyourcounc
il.co.uk.
Well, who thinks he has improved Blackburn?
Let the people and readers of this newspaper decide, Has Blackburn improved?
He was the election agent for Jack Straw between 1979 and 2010, did Blackburn improve in those years, during the Labour government?
I cannot deny he has been on more committe's and been involved with more organisations, than I have had hot dinners, but getting lots of paperwork for your CV does not make you a better person, or a clever person. It just shows you spend your time on too many things, and the result is some of the time, you spend on them, is not effective.
Such as a trip to South Africa in 2010.
So can anybody tell me how "Improve your Council"run by Sir Bill Taylor has improved Blackburn, or been a waste of money?
Also is he sick, because this is a job he will have to remove from his CV?
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
5:13pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Sue Lee
says...
5:37pm Fri 27 Jan 12
TONY WALES
says...
6:09pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Can he tell us what have the non-executive directors improved in the East Lancashire area.
Can he please explain how I am supposed to get home to Nelson, from Blackburn hospital at midnight, after being taken to A and E and told to go home?
Does he know of anybody who gives free lifts, so I don't have to wait all night for the first bus in the morning? I do not have the money for a taxi.
Does he ever travel on this free bus?
What did he do to try to save the Burnley A and E?
So these directors are OK for talking, and drinking cups of tea, but they don't really help the person in the street. They don't have to sit all night in A and E in Blackburn, waiting for the first bus in the morning.
katypri
says...
7:01pm Fri 27 Jan 12
warren2007
says...
7:01pm Fri 27 Jan 12
Come the Revolution
says...
10:20pm Fri 27 Jan 12
dom jolly
says...
1:10am Sat 28 Jan 12
i'm sure each of them will be laughing at us with big pay outs
brok
says...
3:07am Sat 28 Jan 12
From the very start, Atlee's government were forced to make swingeing concessions to the doctors in order to get the institution off the ground.
Always under funded, the NHS faces its greatest challenge in the form of market forces strengthened by a globalised economy; any Welfare State is in danger of becoming an anachronism.
Today, we are a long way from the dream of 'free at the point of delivery' of the 1946 NHS Act.
The history of the financial vulnerability of the NHS has always meant rises and falls in its fortunes in line with the boom and bust economies of recent years.
The influence of America on the social policy of this country has been disastrous for the Welfare provision and Tony Blair was probably the most slavish in his emulation of all things USA.
The influence of market forces will continue to pressurise welfare. We have seen recently the huge cuts in social care provision and the changes reported here are merely a continuation of those changes.
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
8:32am Sat 28 Jan 12
ts of the NHS locally is not clear in the future.
TONY WALES
says...
10:32am Sat 28 Jan 12
My problem, which I have explained before, is how can a person (maybe on a very limited salary, or living on state benefits), pay for a taxi to get back from Blackburn to Nelson, after midnight? After a visit to A and E.
It is not a problem for the nurses, but for the people running and administrating at the hospitals.
Why not run an hourly bus service between 10.0pm and 6.00pm?
It is bad enough for the people of Burnley/Nelson losing a perfectly good A and E department at Burnley General, and as good as the Blackburn hospital is, we do not wish to spend all night, waiting for a bus.
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
5:10pm Sat 28 Jan 12
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
5:10pm Sat 28 Jan 12
Sue Lee
says...
7:53pm Sat 28 Jan 12
al, personnel etc are only 2 or 3 percent of NHS costs, but we voted for the Government who wants 20% reductions. What's got to go?
english rose 1
says...
8:43pm Sat 28 Jan 12
TONY WALES - did you complain about this or not ? What answer did you get ? Have you seen your MP about it ? What did he say ?? Please let us all know the answer.
hairy mary
says...
8:33am Sun 29 Jan 12
brok
says...
9:55pm Sun 29 Jan 12
'I think that we should all have to pay for our health care.'
We always have paid for our health care, mainly in National Health Contributions.
If you wish to see how America does it, go to www.imdb.com/title/t
t0386032/ or just type 'sicko' into your search engine (without the ' s of course) there you will see how a many who lost two fingers was given the chjoice of which finger he wanted back because his Insurance was not sufficient to pay for both.
The NHS does need reform it does not need annihilation, and that is where we are heading at the moment.
I think in some ways Mary is right, if we are to be able to fight for a better more efficient National Health Service, we have to bite the bullet and realise that our contributions have to be seriously increased to pay for it. We need to end the free loading system where overseas visitors can travel to this island to have a baby or treatment they cannot have at home. We need a five year residence qualification before people who move in to this country can have more than the basic health care or, if they have a job, a minimum one year NHS contributions.
We also need to create a culture where people go to the chemist for patent cold medicines; coughs and colds are the reasons most people visit their GP. Dr Samuel Johnson voiced the truism: 'If you treat a cold it will last seven days, leave it alone and it will last a week.'
In conclusion, yes, we do pay for our health care the questions that remain unanswered are: do we pay enough and is this money used effectively?
This country is eighteenth in the top twenty best National Health providers with most of the EU countries above them out side the top twenty by a long way, USA figures at number 37, yet successive governments have held the USA as a role model. (World health organisation, 2010).
goz
says...
11:57am Mon 30 Jan 12
brok wrote:Can't argue with any of that brok, sounds like common sense. But since when has any common sense been applied to anything these days ??
Hairy Mary said,
'I think that we should all have to pay for our health care.'
We always have paid for our health care, mainly in National Health Contributions.
If you wish to see how America does it, go to www.imdb.com/title/t
t0386032/ or just type 'sicko' into your search engine (without the ' s of course) there you will see how a many who lost two fingers was given the chjoice of which finger he wanted back because his Insurance was not sufficient to pay for both.
The NHS does need reform it does not need annihilation, and that is where we are heading at the moment.
I think in some ways Mary is right, if we are to be able to fight for a better more efficient National Health Service, we have to bite the bullet and realise that our contributions have to be seriously increased to pay for it. We need to end the free loading system where overseas visitors can travel to this island to have a baby or treatment they cannot have at home. We need a five year residence qualification before people who move in to this country can have more than the basic health care or, if they have a job, a minimum one year NHS contributions.
We also need to create a culture where people go to the chemist for patent cold medicines; coughs and colds are the reasons most people visit their GP. Dr Samuel Johnson voiced the truism: 'If you treat a cold it will last seven days, leave it alone and it will last a week.'
In conclusion, yes, we do pay for our health care the questions that remain unanswered are: do we pay enough and is this money used effectively?
This country is eighteenth in the top twenty best National Health providers with most of the EU countries above them out side the top twenty by a long way, USA figures at number 37, yet successive governments have held the USA as a role model. (World health organisation, 2010).
Burnley A&E ??
Transferring the NICU ward and the maternity services to Burnley ??
I drove to Burnley the other week and from junction 5 at Guide, the inside lane was bumper to bumper and stretched back almost a half mile. Am glad i dont live in Burnley the chances of surviving a serious condition now which needs A&E must have seriously diminished.
The NHS....Too many chiefs, not enough indians.
Sir Bill Taylor
says...
1:33pm Mon 30 Jan 12
mavrick says...
1:51pm Fri 27 Jan 12