The health secretary will soon have a new power to intervene in local NHS decision-making on how health services are set up.
At the end of the month, the Government will implement regulations which allow individuals who are concerned about ICB or NHS England actions to request ministerial involvement.
This will apply to ‘NHS reconfigurations’, which could mean a change to how a service is delivered or a cut to services.
After a concern is raised, the health secretary then makes a decision on next steps, deciding whether the ICB’s plans should go ahead or not.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has said this intervention in local decisions will ‘help unblock issues’ at any stage of a reconfiguration project.
‘The aim of a ministerial intervention is to support local partners to find a way forward, to enable improvement to happen faster and produce sustainable solutions to NHS services facing challenges,’ the guidance said.
This means that from February, GPs and any other concerned individuals can use the ‘call-in request’ to ask the health secretary to intervene.
DHSC states that concerns must be about the process followed by a commissioner, for example whether public consultation was adequate, or about a decision that ‘is not in the best interests of the health service in the area’.
But DHSC said it expects these requests ‘only to be used in exceptional situations where local resolution has not been reached’.
NHS commissioners must therefore ‘take all reasonable steps’ to resolve local concerns – without evidence of this, the health secretary is very unlikely to get involved.
These new powers were introduced by the Health and Care Act 2022, which also established integrated care systems (ICSs) as statutory organisations, thereby abolishing CCGs.
In September, two LMCs submitted a vote of no confidence to Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB following concerns GPs could be ‘forced into a salaried contract’.
They argued that the ICB had made ‘no real engagement’ with primary care, and that the ‘future of the partnership model has been questioned’.
In Lancashire last year, controversy erupted over the award of an APMS contract for a GP practice where there had been a single-handed partner for 10 years.
The ICB agreed to re-run the procurement process for the contract following concerns raised by staff and patients who said the public was not properly consulted and who held multiple protests at the centre.
