NHS reforms will be overseen by “demoralised” managers

NHS Managers are “about to go into the biggest challenge of [their] professional careers demoralised, with heads down and unfit” according to senior NHS executive Mike Farrar.

Farrar, who heads up the North West Strategic Health Authority (SHA), the UK’s second largest, said that the “biggest barrier” to sweeping reforms laid out by the government in the Health and Social Care Bill “is a lack of belief and desire to win in the people that have to make it happen.”

The government plans to phase out the SHAs and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) that currently oversee much of the decision-making in the NHS. Thousands of people are expected to lose their jobs.

However, the SHAs and PCTs will play a vital role in the transitory period between the old organisation and the new; they must transfer their responsibilities to GPs and local authorities who, together, will control more than 70 per cent of the NHS budget.

Farrar called the plans “the most radical reform of the health service that we’ve seen in its 60 year history”. He said he believed most NHS managers would have approved the proposals had they been introduced individually but “few would have suggested [implementing them] at the same time in an environment where you have little money to oil the wheels of change and you’re telling the people who will oversee the change that they’ll have no job at the end of it.”

Farrar was speaking at a seminar at Cass Business School in London held after the release of the NHS White Paper, the document which prefigured the current bill.