Ministerial micro-management of the NHS must stop, according to the National Audit Office’s report into the Better Care Fund. The report demonstrated that government interference has done more harm than good.
The Better Care Fund’s forensic dissection at the hands of the National Audit Office (NAO) fiasco is a tough lesson in the dangers of ministerial interference in health and care systems under stress.
The report Planning for the Better Care Fund was published earlier this week. It exposed the gross mishandling of the entire project by the government. The fund was the gambit for the coalition in the battle with Labour over who would integrate social care and the NHS.
Government blamed for mishandling Better Care Fund
The Better Care Fund was launched as a flagship policy in the 2013 Autumn Statement, and was welcomed as a brave, bold and triumphant move which recycled old money into extra funding.
NHS England and Local Government Association (LGA) published guidance on how it work, this guidance was then scrapped and the process was restarted, diminishing the optimism that came with Better Care Fund.
As time went on, the NHS was pummelled with high emergency admissions which led to more and more trusts falling into deficit.
Matters were made worse when vocal lobbying by the Foundation Trust Network raised the spectre of the cuts in acute budgets in hopes of paying off the fund, sending even more NHS hospitals sliding into deficit.
Recently the management of the Better Care Fund has improved, regarding which the NAO observes, this ‘would have avoided waste and frustration had it been in place from the start’. Nonetheless, the new local savings plan aiming to save £523m still has little credibility.
The NAO report is rife with irritation at the way in which government drove the Better Care Fund into the ground with its repeated basic errors, failure to agree on financial services and objectives, and failure to plan appropriately for the resources that had been made available.
As a result of this mishandling has setback the shift of resources from hospitals to communities as relations between hospitals and councils have been damaged and have cost more than councils or the NHS can afford.
