Integrated care systems are part of the government’s plans for NHS organisations, in partnership with local councils and others, to take collective responsibility for managing resources, delivering NHS standards, and improving the health of the population they serve. This seemingly laudable development has the potential to further undermine the NHS, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The NHS in England is being rapidly and profoundly changed under the cover of COVID-19. There is no public consultation or the necessary legal Local Authority scrutiny on what are emergency measures being made permanent as part of Integrated Care Systems (ICS) development.
The changes include unproven innovation, privatisation and paid for care, and the developing systems present clear opportunities for commercialisation and private investment. The government’s procurement response to the COVID pandemic has been wholly unaccountable and riddled with corruption.
We call for full democratic Local Authority scrutiny and public consultation, as well as democratic representation (i.e. partnership) throughout the incipient ICS structures. We demand a renationalised National Health Service in the longer term.
We passed the following motion at a recent meeting of Doctors in Unite.
Integrated Care Systems:
ICS have been introduced and developed undemocratically, without consultation and with a lack of transparency. Their aim is to impose ‘reduced per capita cost‘ control totals to force unproven and unsolicited innovation, including elements of privatisation and paid for care, in each system’s struggle to meet local population need. This has been NHSE/I’s practice with individual Provider Trusts over recent years. Each ICS will form a new Integrated Care Provider (ICP) organisation. NHS England plans for ICP organisations to be managed through commercial contracts. We therefore call on government to ensure that:
1.Local Authority Scrutiny Committees across England be allowed to fulfil their legal responsibilities to scrutinise fully the significant changes in NHS services that have been initiated without scrutiny under the COVID-19 emergency measures before they become any permanent part of ICS development. If the Committees decide that the changes require full Public Consultation then this must also happen before the changes are allowed to remain. These actions are well established legal process.
2. Some democratic representation is created in the Governance structures of ICSs by: i) an increase in Local Authority Councillor representation on the Governing Bodies so as to match in numbers the NHS representation (Partnership) and ii) full public engagement and involvement for all significant changes and developments in the NHS, with full Consultation as well on the more major issues as decided by the Scrutiny Committees which have been set up in our democracy for this purpose.
3. In the longer term there must be a return to universal risk pooling and funding with renewed efforts for National equity of care and National decisions about affordability. ICS must be replaced by Health Boards with the return to geographically based responsibility for the delivery of health to local populations. The apparatus of the market that divides the NHS must be dismantled. Health Boards as public, accountable bodies would plan and provide the full range of NHS services, with participation from elected councillors, community organisations, Neighbourhood Health Committees as advocated in our paper “Public Health and Primary Care” and trade unions. The quality of services would then be monitored by locally-based independent bodies involving local patients and community groups, with the powers once enjoyed by Community Health Councils.
Doctors in Unite 