Cottage Hospitals

If they reintroduce Cottage Hospitals will they bring back SEN's do you think? They played such an important role and I believe is part of the reason things went so wrong. As a ward sister myself I knew my SEN's could be relied on totally and took care of the patients every day care to such a high standard and knew so much about the ward and the way it worked. They didnt expect to become mini doctors and knew they were there to do the basic caring work. Couldn't have managed without my amazing auxiliary nurses either......

I agree, nanapug. My mother was an SEN until she retired in the 80s.
The worst thing they did was to make nursing an all graduate career so nobody wanted to do the caring for patients.

Durhamjen

Forgive me for asking/saying this, I don't think you will not accept it when I say/ask the following, I hope not because I am not trying to point score or be snide I assure you.

It has become quite common that the mere mention of the NHS has you putting a link up to a certain party and accusing the government of privatising the NHS.

It can't have gone unnoticed that this thread has you offering words of tribute to the new NHS Head and being pro his actions, on this matter at least. Has this appointment given you hope the NHS is 'maybe' in safer hands.

My view for what it's worth he has made a reasonably good start, he couldn't have done much worse than his predecessor.

Does the NHS Chief Exec have the power to implement a policy that goes against the grain of the Government's policy of concentrating facilities in bigger hospitals?

The government is privatising the NHS, POGS. Simon Stevens, before he became head of NHS England, was CEO of UnitedHealth, a private health company in the US. If you look up Unitedhealth UK, which I will let you do for yourself, you will find that they have taken over running of some GP surgeries in England. However, they have had to hand one back because they found they could not make a profit out of it.
So it depends on what he shows he has come back here for; perhaps he has seen the error of his ways in America. He was a health adviser for Blair before he went to the US, which is also not a good thing.

United Health is not the only company to have done this. In Newcastle, Care UK took over a GP practice in September 2012, with a contract up to August 2017. They have handed back the contract and will exit in January 2015, because they cannot make a profit out of it, because it is in a poor area in Newcastle.

I agree Stevens could not do any worse than Nicholson. Nicholson now seems to be backtracking on everything he said and did while in power, and hoping we'll thank him for it.

Which party do I put links up to?

In other words local GP consortia could contract with a private local hospital to do care for chronically sick and recovering patients. Ah now i understand.

Anno, I understood that the power was to be taken away from the minister and given to the heads of the separate NHS boards. Monitor had overall monitoring, but the power was in the hands of the CEOs.
But Hunt has meetings with the heads every week and they are getting thoroughly fed up of his interfering.
Lansley gave away the power and Hunt agreed with him because they did not want to be blamed for the mess they were going to create.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that they get their comeuppance with Stevens. Some things are definitely unravelling.
Unfortunately if the secret TTIP meetings cary on and it gets ratified in Europe the privatisers win.