Written by: Annabel.Hibbard 21/11/2011 15:30
8th December 2011
The latest news this week is that the Care Quality Commission is working on a letter to be sent in January to Local Authority HealthWatch Commissioners setting out the CQC view of what an effective HealthWatch should look like. This is going to reflect the work CQC are currently doing with the 22 LINks involved in their National Development Project.
At a project meeting on Wednesday those LINks in attendance, including myself representing Leeds LINk, had a brainstorming session on the kind of detail which needs to go in that letter. I think, as a result, the CQC got a lot of strong and valuable messages to use.
CQC have decided on this course of action because of feedback being received from Local Authorities and LINks and because the Department of Health hasn’t issued such guidance as yet. They are also conscious of the commissioning timescale and that January is pretty much the latest this sort of communication can afford to go out.
Week commencing 5th December I've got the next of my CQC/LINks project meeting in London on Wednesday (7th). This will focus on the various mini-projects each of the participating LINks is working on back at the coal face. My chosen mini-project for Leeds LINk relates to the Leeds HealthWatch Pathfinder and is around "Standardising The Standards". It attempts to pull together the best of the rest so to speak, by analysing the standards which various monitoring bodies assess service providers/premises by i.e LINk Enter and View visit; CQC inspection; Hospital Trust PEAT (Patient Environment Action Team) inspection etc. Jim Kerr
Well, after the excitement of stumbling upon the Emmerdale shoot on Monday, on Tuesday I found myself confronted with lithe, cavorting dancers at the Northern Ballet building in the centre of Leeds! This was for the "Healthy Changes?" seminar organised by Involve Yorkshire & Humber. It was a chance for LINks and voluntary sector reps to hear an overview of the many changes due between now and 2013 around health, social care and public health.
Much of what was on offer was a reprise of information already in the public domain, but it was a useful reminder of just how much of a breadth of services CCG's will be responsible for commissioning. The term Clinical Senates arose and I must admit this was a new one on me. It's something in its infancy at the moment, having been borne out of the listening exercise feedback. I'm trying to find out from DoH more about their role, any interface they'll have with HWE and what their PPI obligations will be. Watch this space for updates. We also heard that HWE was set up in shadow form last month and I'm also looking into this with DoH, as that's not quite what HWAG members got by way of their most recent update.
28th November 2011 The first of two meetings in Leeds for me this week, was the informal networking session for Chairs of LINks across Yorkshire and Humber region on Monday morning. This was held in St George's Centre adjacent to the church and The Crypt, which turned out to also be where Emmerdale was being filmed that morning - watch out for the episode where Ashley visits the new parish he's thinking of moving to!
The main thing I got out of this forum was the message that a small minority of Local Authorities (LA's) appear not to realise time is now of the essence in procuring a Local HealthWatch (LHW) for their area. My understanding is that for any LHW to be in situ by October 2012 as per statutory requirements, LA’s need to decide about their method of procurement e.g whether or not the HealthWatch contract will go out to open procurement asap because if that is the decision that is taken that it will then the tendering exercise takes several months to go through! So any LINk who knows their respective LA isn't already thinking about this and doesn’t have a timescale in place, would be advised to have a conversation with their contact at the LA to flag this risks they could be facing of running out of time to have a LHW in place in time.
Meetings being attended week beginning 28th November 2011
Week ending 18th November 2011
At the CQC in London on Tuesday, I was representing Leeds LINk at the collaborative working project meeting and we got an update on the latest news about HealthWatch England (HWE). Their national base will be in the CQC Leeds office at St Pauls House. Total headcount will be 26 staff, including 8 regional appointments based around the country. Appointment of the Chair is anticipated in April 2012. To date an outline structure has been put in place, but there won’t be any further detailed developments until the Chair is in place, to allow them to shape the organisation as they see fit.
CQC staff expect there to be a relationship between their inspection work and the enforcement/regulatory powers HWE will have. Personally I’m not sure we really know enough at this stage about what the full remit of HWE will and won’t actually be. And now we know their headcount, I do wonder what their workload capacity will be.
My Thursday London day out was to the Department of Health (DoH) for a consultation on a piece of work they’re doing jointly with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). During the summer the Prime Minister announced the public would be given easier access to information about GP performance, to be let them be better informed under the Government’s choice agenda. His vision was for all the relevant data to be easily accessed through one website, rather than the multitude of different sites which currently need to be accessed to view the various bits of data. He set DoH a challenging 5 month deadline to get the website up and running and the public able to access this from a date in December. This will be in addition to the exiting GP data available on the NHS Choices website.
We were supposed to be shown an example of a data spreadsheet on the shadow website currently available, but it crashed! However, we did discuss in groups the QOF's (Quality Outcome Framework) measures which will all appear on the website, with a view to establishing a couple of dozen key indicators which the group thought likely to be the ones of most interest to the public in general. The idea is they’d be given the greatest prominence on the website, with the remaining measures being accessible as a sub-link if required. I rather got the impression the DoH people were expecting we’d more or less rubber stamp their proposals, but that wasn’t quite the reaction they got. The main concerns raised were the language used to describe measures needing to be converted from official speak into plain English and providing background information explaining what the targets meant. DoH did admit the timescales they were working to and the enormity of the task meant only a basic type of website was possible at this stage and it would be very much an evolving process. They indicated we’d be invited back for future input in due course.
Another theme I’ve picked up on this week in three different forums is GP Patient Participation Groups (PPG’s). There’s a statutory expectation all GP surgeries in England should have a PPG, although in reality only around 50% actually do. This lack of buy in to this concept worries me with the emerging importance of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG’s) and their statutory requirements for patient engagement. Does your GP surgery have a PPG? If not, why not? If you fancy helping set one up, don’t feel the burden would be a personal one as a PCT has powers in this area. I live in Wakefield where the PCT has acted as a successful broker in establishing 34 PPG’s across its patch to date. I’m actively involved with the bedding in of a PPG in my own GP surgery and perceive after our second meeting it could be a platform for real patient benefit.
Looking ahead the DoH was due to hold a two day HeathWatch Advisory Group (HWAG) Task and Finish Group residential course next week around governance issues for Local HealthWatch (LHW). Regrettably this has been cancelled due to a lack of response. Guidance on governance has been something LINks have been consistently asking for over a period of time, so this cancellation hasn’t gone down well. Although DoH felt not enough HWAG members had signed up to attend, those who had put their names down were of the opinion it was just the right size of group for the piece of work to be effective. It remains to be seen how this all pans out.
On the horizon the HWAG next meets in London next month and I’ll be attending. As yet no agenda is available, although we don’t always get one. Nearer the time I’ll update you in case there are any issues/questions you may want me to raise, should the opportunity to arise.
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