07 June 2002
At the NHS Confederation's annual conference in Harrogate, Health Secretary Alan Milburn said he would announce allocations covering three years this autumn.
'PCTs will receive funding not for a single year but for three years. Annual planning and target-setting can become a thing of the past. Local health services will be able to concentrate on what needs to be done to bring about improvements over the medium rather than the short term,' he said.
'To help the NHS focus on this longer-term capacity building over the next three years, there will be a minimum amount of earmarking of local NHS resources by the centre. PCTs will have greater discretion over how growing NHS resources are spent.'
NHS Confederation policy director Nigel Edwards welcomed the move. 'People have been asking for three-year allocations for some time but we want to know now what it actually means,' he said.
'How definite will the allocations be? Earmarking is an issue, but even if funds are not earmarked there is still a lot of central direction on how the money can be spent. However, there are encouraging noises being made at the centre and we are moving in the right direction.'
Milburn said that he was encouraging health care providers from other countries to bring clinical teams, particularly surgeons, to England to help cut waiting lists.
'I will be meeting with prospective providers from both Europe and America over the course of the next few months with a view to encouraging them to invest in Britain,' he said. 'They will concentrate on elective surgery in hard-pressed specialities in those parts of the country where capacity constraints are greatest. I expect to see a growing number of these new providers in place later this year.'
These new providers would be permanent, giving more choice to patients and more diversity in provision.
The confederation said bringing in overseas providers was 'eminently sensible'.
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