£3.8bn NHS Much better Care Fund policy halted right after damning Whitehall evaluation

The Far better Care Fund was meant to lessen the increasing pressures on hospitals and hold men and women more healthy in their personal homes. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Photographs

A flagship government policy intended to stop the NHS from getting to be overwhelmed has been halted right after a confidential Whitehall review concluded it would not function as hoped, or aid balance the NHS budget, or deliver about an intended revolution in patient care.

The £3.8bn a yr Better Care Fund was supposed to have been launched last week, but its introduction has been delayed following the Cabinet Office voiced deep disquiet about its viability and argued that there was minor or no detail about how the expected savings would be delivered.

A Whitehall supply stated the Cabinet Office believed that the claims for the Better Care Fund did not stack up and wished “a lot a lot more perform completed on the policy”.

The concept behind the program, due to be introduced in April subsequent 12 months, was to deliver together wellness and social care services – typically funded by neighborhood authorities – in the belief that this would decrease the developing pressures on hospitals and assist hold individuals healthier in their own residences.

The delay in its launch is a setback for the wellness secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and local government secretary Eric Pickles, who had been supporters of the strategy and had been due to attend its launch last Wednesday.

The Much better Care Fund is partly funded by the Division of Well being, which was to have contributed £1.9bn from the £40bn hospital budget from subsequent April, in the belief that it would release cost savings to compensate for the cash transferred from the NHS.

Even so, it is understood that the Cabinet Workplace overview identified that regional financial savings programs lacked monetary credibility, with little or no detail about how cost savings would be delivered.

Now a group of officials from each departments accountable for the new policy have been informed to make added proof to make it more “credible” and conquer deep Cabinet Workplace scepticism.

Commencing in April up coming 12 months in England, the initiative was meant to minimize the two overcrowding in A&ampE units and the number of men and women admitted for hospital treatment. Half of the £3.8bn annual budget would come from the NHS, with all of the money going into schemes that see health and social care solutions operating collectively in a significant phase in direction of the purpose of integrating them.

Projects would aid keep frail, older men and women and people with lengthy-phrase problems this kind of as diabetes and breathing troubles healthier in their very own residences and steer clear of costly, pointless stays in hospital. Ministers described the new strategy as crucial to hold the NHS sustainable.

But the Cabinet Workplace is also thought to have been concerned that hospitals have been consulted far as well minor about the strategies, while nearby councils and the GP-led NHS clinical commissioning groups have drawn up regional ideas.

A Whitehall source acquainted with the scenario said: “The Greater Care Fund is primarily based on the concept that if you invest to build up solutions outside of hospitals primarily based on integrated care, that will support you to in the long run conserve funds from the hospital spending budget. But the ideas produced so far will not demonstrate in detail where savings will be accomplished as a result of the investment, or that hospitals will be capable to lessen their spending.

“Simply because they don’t, the Cabinet Workplace never think the plans created so far are credible sufficient and do not have enough info in them about how the cost savings will be produced or in depth sufficient forecasts.”

Launching a report last week by the King’s Fund health thinktank which argued that the NHS was on the brink of a significant fiscal crisis, its chief executive, Prof Chris Ham, criticised the Greater Care Fund, as presently envisaged, as “totally unrealistic”.

Ham, a member of David Cameron’s brief-lived group of NHS advisers, explained hospital budgets could only be lowered if considerably much more care was previously being presented by GPs, local community nurses and personnel who assistance sufferers in their very own houses. But “the difficulty is that beneath the government’s programs all of this has to be done in time for strategies and budgets to be agreed for 2015-sixteen. This is entirely unrealistic.”

Taking the £1.9bn away from hospitals “will put extra pressure on an NHS previously struggling to balance the books and preserve acceptable specifications of patient care,” Ham additional.

Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive when the fund was first announced last year, had described the pooled £3.8bn spending budget as “a game-changer” for the way patients would obtain care, but warned that it involved a possible “fiscal cliff edge” for hospitals.

Several senior NHS figures concern that the money will be used by neighborhood councils to help alleviate the deep cuts they have seen to their budgets beneath the coalition. Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS England’s healthcare director, has admitted that there is “great scepticism” in the NHS that it will fund the sort of projects meant and “concern that the labels will be taken off the income and that it will be used for filling in potholes and other significant factors”.

Last week Bill Shields, the chief monetary officer at Imperial University Healthcare NHS trust in London, one of the greatest NHS hospital groups, stated: “The cynic in me says that this is a way of taking money from the NHS and passing it on to the regional authority vote. The expectation is that this will enable them to make very good the cliff edge they’ve been by way of in the last handful of years and rebuild the regional government public finances.”

It would also imply “in effect a substantial actual-terms reduction in NHS cash flow … going forward”, he said.

The Department of Health’s very own advice on who need to obtain the £1.1bn it is placing into social care this 12 months, which includes £200m for the Greater Care Fund, seems to confirm that it is in effect shifting money from the NHS straight to neighborhood councils.

The advice, published on its internet site, says that tasks eligible for a share include these which “would be decreased due to price range pressures in local authorities without having this investment”.

£3.8bn NHS Much better Care Fund policy halted right after damning Whitehall evaluation