Whilst the rest of us are busy being polite, it’s Frank’s job to find out what’s going on and say it like it is. In his new column, Frank catches up with World Class Commissioning.
Somebody up north thinks it’s a good idea to get residents to vote on a cuts hit list which includes older people, disabled people and people with learning disabilities.
Let’s face it, commissioning is just buying stuff for other people with other people’s money. I knew we were in ego-bother when somebody added ‘World Class’ to it.
One world class cocktail of hubris and austerity with an unmeasured dash of ‘stimulating the market’ later (did it even reach the glass?) has well nigh done us in. Here we are, margins squeezed drier than a commissioner’s eye, core contracts and grants in tatters, still waiting for that rare bird, the Personal Budget, to lay its golden eggs.
If you get any of the fabled eggs, don’t be tempted to put them all in the health and well-being basket. The Chief Medical Officer says there is no evidence base for well-being. Mark her words. Well-being is a decoy to lure the real McCoy of mental health into the mainstream, never to clutch at the purse strings of a commissioner again.
Social care is not faring much better either. Somewhere up north, somebody thinks it’s a good idea to get residents to vote on a cuts hit list which includes older people, disabled people and people with learning disabilities. Presumably, this ingenious ad hoc democracy is replacing both FACS eligibility and commissioning, so we can safely put social services and commissioners on the hit list too, preferably with pre-marked crosses.
My favourite piece of World Class Commissioning has to be that relating to the inexorably growing business of signposting. Aided and abetted by the Care Act, signposting is going to delay the need for care. Signposting is going to reduce hospital admissions. Its intellectually superior sister, intelligent signposting, might even send people to useful destinations. Meanwhile, the money for useful destinations is disappearing, some of it into the pot for signposting.
When World Class Commissioning finally understands that voluntary and community sector destinations are the source of the prevention which they, like Columbus, have lately discovered, it will be too late. The world for the vulnerable will be all signposts and no destinations. At which point, there will be no need for signposts either. That’s world class that.
Frank
Frank will have more blunt observations in future issues. Watch this space.
