NHS reforms: Mutuals will give staff ‘right to provide’
This article explains how health secretary Andrew Lansley will invite doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff to forming “mutuals” which will contract with the NHS to provide care for patients.
“Healthcare professionals in specialised areas, such as eating disorders, alcohol, and drug detox, mental health and sexual health could set up their own organisations with mutual ownership.”
This article profiles a key early move in the development of the “Right to Run” idea. This comes interestingly on the same day that the Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement reveals only 1 in 10 people are interested in active voluntary work over the next 2 years.
I have thought for a while that there is a big job underlying the encouragement of workers and communities to do more for themselves, which may have been under estimated in the context of the Big Society idea.
Not that the idea, from my point of view at least, is a bad thing per se.
The juxtaposition of the findings of the Hansard Society and the encouragement to mutualisation within the NHS is just one example of the emerging tensions around translating the idea of the Big Society into reality.