For everyone who couldn’t make the Conference, here is Jessica’s speech to our Fringe meeting on the future of Women’s health that I referred to earlier in a members email.
Jean Hardiman Smith
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. My name is Jessica Ormerod. I run a research and information organisation called Public Matters with my lovely friend and colleague Deborah Harrington.
Although we write about all aspects of the NHS and other public services, I have a particular interest in maternity. I have been writing about maternity issues for seven years since I was the chair of the maternity services liaison committee for Lewisham Hospital which coincided with our fight to save our maternity services. We won that fight but we have by no means won the war because as you know maternity services up and down the country are being closed and downgraded.
But before anything else I want to paint the picture of what is happening to the NHS as a whole. Because every closed maternity ward, service or reduction in staff is the direct result of changes to the NHS that have been happening since the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. These changes are having a devastating impact on access to care. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the reversal of 70 years of universal, comprehensive and equitable care.
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act put into place all the major elements for a step change in the privatisation of the NHS.
A QUANGO called NHS England was formed as the Commissioner-in-Chief of the service, with over 200 subordinate local commissioning units. These commissioning units broke with the tradition of planning services, replacing it with buying in from public, private and voluntary sector providers. Areas of work are subdivided into contractable units and NHS public providers are obliged to compete. The loss of a contract means loss of income, which has a knock-on effect on the viability of the public sector, which is left with high cost acute care and a reduced income.
In 2014 a new CEO was appointed to run the NHS in England. He created a new plan for the NHS, the Five Year Forward View and this was greeted by the establishment as a welcome antidote to what was seen as the fragmented mess left by the 2012 Act (this was only a mere 18 months on from it being enacted). But it’s important to recognize that far from being an accident, the Act achieved the fragmentation necessary for privatisation to be embedded at an organisational level, including many major health industry players taking key roles in the commissioning and policy-making process.
At the heart of NHS England’s Five Year Forward View is the idea that the NHS in England will never again be funded to a level that maintains its services in the way they are run now. It puts together a series of proposals for change which are not just cuts but are about a fundamental reshaping of how services are provided. Expensive specialist and emergency care are relocated to centralised hubs and more care is to be delivered in the community via partnerships with local authorities. There is an aspiration for fewer emergency admissions with an improvement to overall health which it argues will lead to less dependency on NHS services.
We could say the scope of this aspiration is far reaching or we could say it is pie in the sky. It not only assumes the NHS can cope with a growing population without corresponding growth in services but that it will do so with a reduced service with much of the change becoming the responsibility of local authorities.
The process of transforming the NHS in England, is based on close co-operation between successive politicians and Department of Health managers over many years with the US Health Maintenance Organisation or Accountable Care Organization principles of managed care. This process is continuing without any checks and balances of substance within the formal organisational structures of government. Politicians go to great lengths to deny both privatisation and US influence on the current changes.
There is, however, a groundswell of resistance to the damage being done to the NHS and there is a lot of knowledge surrounding individual service contractions and closures, but little in the public domain about the overall programme of change. And that is what I am here to talk about today.
The National Maternity Review, aka Better Births – A Five Year Forward View for Maternity Care, is one of the Five Year Forward View’s New Models of Care. It emphasises community care delivered through local hubs with a theoretical reduced demand on hospital services. It recommends an increase in independent sector providers and introduces Personal Care Maternity Budgets. Personal Care Budgets commoditise and monetise the system. They add layers of unnecessary complication, increase expense, fragment accountability and lead to an accounting nightmare.
44 Local Maternity Systems have been established. The systems have been introduced without consultation, peer review, pilot studies or effective oversight from public health or parliamentary scrutiny. They are small-scale Integrated Care Systems. Unlike the Integrated Care Organisations which are now under consultation, they have been put into place with very little fanfare or institutional opposition.
As with all the changes to the NHS currently taking place, there is a real problem that rhetoric about better care closer to home is not matched by real resources or access to physical structures like hospitals. NHS England consistently refers to services being more important than organisations but fail to fill in the blanks about how this works. They also insist that travelling in order to receive excellent care is not a concern to patients. There is no acknowledgment that time, expense and severity of health condition all very much effect the distance people are able to travel regardless of the excellence of the service at the end of the journey.
In the case of maternity, these questions of distance and the emphasis on community care run two different risks. The first being the potential for increase of emergencies outside hospital setting. The second is that mothers might be taken in to hospital for assisted birth or caesarean in order to pre-empt risk arising.
But what makes maternity different from other services?
Most people use health services most at the beginning and end of their lives. Pregnant women are the exception to this. During pregnancy women come into more contact with the NHS than they probably have ever done in their lives. This is particularly the case if they have a complicated pregnancy or birth. Healthy women can become profoundly unwell during pregnancy and they can be vulnerable to life-threatening complications during birth. That’s why it is so important that women have all levels of care within easy access.
Until now maternity services have been provided in the most part by the NHS. Women have always been free to employ a private midwife. But the NHS has a duty to provide a midwife at every birth even if a private midwife is also in attendance.
Maternity services are woven through the traditional structure of the NHS. Women see their midwife at home or at their local GP. They receive a minimum of two scans to check the baby’s progress and health at the local hospital. If they have a pre-existing condition or they develop a pregnancy-related illness then their specialist will work alongside the maternity team to ensure that the woman and baby are safe and as healthy as possible throughout the pregnancy.
Currently women can give birth at home, in a ‘stand-alone’ facility run by midwives, ‘co-located midwifery unit’ – that’s a midwife-run facility on hospital grounds, or in an obstetric unit which includes doctors and surgical theatre. Obstetric units can only be sited in hospitals with A&E because they require acute services which is blood, air and surgeons. A woman can become dangerously ill very quickly during birth so timely access to acute care is essential.
Put this into the context that since 2010 maternity services have been starved of funds and there has been a staff recruitment and retention crisis. Many maternity units have already been downgraded or closed, hundreds of GP practices have also closed so women already travel further to receive care. This means it costs more and takes more time to see a midwife, GP or hospital doctor. It also means longer emergency transfer times. The risk is this will only get worse once the STPs restructuring of the NHS is complete.
Who is driving the changes to maternity?
Surprise, surprise, Better Births panel includes private health providers and those private companies are working with government to re-write policy.
Although most current providers are NHS hospitals, private providers are now being strongly encouraged. Local Maternity Systems set their own payment systems. This means that they can choose whether they pay via their geographical population or they can pay per activity or service. However, they do not follow established budget areas; they do not share boundaries with CCGs or Local Authorities even though they rely on budgets from both. Across the country there is now a mish-mash of payment systems. The risk is that women will fall through the gaps.
NHS Trusts have been ‘incentivised’ to adopt Better Births by offering a chance to win ‘pioneer funding’ to speed up the transition to the New Models of Care. In November 2016, Seven ‘early adopter’ sites started to implement the recommendations – I don’t need tell you about this because you’re part of it! The sites were told to be bold and radical. Another incentive is ‘the maternity challenge fund’ which instructs successful trusts ‘to explore innovative ways to use women’s and their partners’ feedback to improve maternity services’. A pioneer site is not the same as a pilot test site.
LMSs are encouraged to work alongside private providers in order to offer women a wider choice. As most women have previously been cared for by the NHS this simply means opening the door to the private sector. In a climate of serious staff shortages, it is possible that some midwives may see the benefit of setting up an independent midwifery practice rather than staying in the NHS. Despite protestations to the contrary, this does actually reduce the ‘NHS offer’ and opens an income stream for public money to be handed over to the private sector.
Better Births tells us it is working on a new accreditation scheme for maternity providers. But in a publicly provided NHS service, this is unnecessary because the NHS trains staff to a professional standard.
Private providers are required to have a contract with the NHS in order to receive payment via a Personal Care Budget. It is claimed that the budgets (which are described as ‘notional’) will demonstrate to CCGs the kinds of choices women make during pregnancy, birth and postnatally. This will apparently encourage CCGs to respond to women by increasing their offer. The claim is that this will also empower women. But it is decidedly unclear about how this can be achieved. The guidance talks about using Personal Care Budgets for birth pools, place of birth settings or breastfeeding support but all of this should be available to every woman regardless of a personal care budget. In fact, all of these used to be available to women as part of the normal care given by the NHS.
Moreover, it precludes the notion that women become ill in pregnancy. No one chooses to get gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, HELLP or any other life-threatening condition. What happens when your health needs change but you’ve used up your £3000 on hypno-birthing? There should be real concern about the potential lack of access to obstetric care when women have serious complications of pregnancy. Or to return to the issue of financial balance, if £3000 is a notional budget for a normal birth which can be used up in a number of ways then the acute hospital will potentially have to pick up the cost of the emergency care without a matching budget.
What does this all mean?
Scale and pace have taken precedence over caution and evidence. Academic research will take years to catch up to establish the public health consequences of this new policy.
This is a top-down reorganisation of a national service with little to no consultation, pilot schemes, peer review, oversight or risk assessment. A Health Select Committee inquiry into the maternity transformation plan was not completed because of the 2017 election. It has not been re-opened.
The Vice-Chair of the maternity transformation programme finishes his report with the following advice to LMSs: Be Bold! Don’t wait for instruction!
Clearly long gone are the years of epidemiological study, of public health planning, of consultation with experts.
Better Births is based on consumer choice issues around personalised maternity care. There is a serious lack of evidence that this restructuring will give women the vital services they need. There are fewer services, obstetric departments are being stretched even further and technology is replacing face-to-face clinical care.
On the other hand, it embeds private care and fee-for-service. And, most importantly of all this is not how a national public service works.