Harriett Baldwin this week welcomed news that NHS Worcestershire has shelved plans to merge local Community Hospitals with the Worcestershire Acute Hospital Trust. However, she remains concerned that a rushed process of reorganization is being dictated to Worcestershire by Whitehall just weeks before a General Election. In his Stakeholder Brief dated February 2010, Paul Bates, Chief Executive of NHS Worcestershire announced that the Board has recognised that a plan to transfer community hospitals to the Acute Hospital Trust “did not have the broader support of other stakeholders, including the County Council and the PCT staff.” However it is now suggested that an entirely new provider arm is established to include community hospitals and that the Mental Health Trust be dissolved and its staff and assets moved to the new entity. Harriett Baldwin said, “Don’t merge our local hospitals with the Mental Health Trust now. With only weeks to go until a General Election, it beggars belief that Whitehall is trying to force through these top-down changes at such a fast pace. This week the Conservative Party announced radical proposals to allow public sector workers to establish co-operatives. This would give power to the public sector workers who are fed up with Gordon Brown’s top-down control of their working lives. It would be better to wait to see who wins the next General Election before making any changes in Worcestershire.” Andrew Lansley, Shadow Secretary of State for Health said, “We support there being a split between the commissioners and providers of NHS services because that creates the right incentives for top quality care, but it’s not for the Department of Health to be dictating to PCTs how they go about this. Creating a community foundation trust is a perfectly acceptable model and the PCT should be able to go ahead with this if it feels it is best. Public sector workers across Worcestershire could become their own boss and deliver better services under new Conservative plans. Under bold proposals, public sector workers would have a powerful new right to form employee-owned co-operatives to take over the services they deliver. This will empower thousands of public sector workers across Worcestershire. The new right to form employee-owned co-operatives will apply throughout the vast majority of the public sector – including JobCentre Plus offices, community nursing teams and primary schools. Employee-owned co-operatives will continue to be funded by the state so long as they meet national standards, but will be freed from centralised bureaucracy and political micromanagement. They will be voluntary sector, not-for-profit organisations; any financial surpluses would be reinvested into the service and the staff who work there, rather than distributed to external shareholders. | Stakeholder Brief Special Edition, Feb 2010