The Chief Officer’s Report to the 11 August Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Governing Body meeting – to be held at Shay Stadium from 2-5pm – states that the CCG is short of money this year, and that the CCG may have to consider:

“more challenging areas for generating cost savings”

eg:

• reducing outpatient follow ups to a single follow up appointment to an elective treatment
• 
stopping prescribing medicines for self-limiting illnesses, vitamins, food supplements and gluten-free diets
• cherry picking patients for medical and surgical treatments, so that only those who are most likely to benefit receive them. (Update 13 August: At the 11 August Calderdale CCG Governing Body, Matt Walsh the Chief Officer clarified that limiting medical and surgical interventions to patients most likely to benefit would only apply to “procedures of limited value”, where only certain patients will benefit – not across the board.)

This is what happens when you remove the Secretary of State’s duty to provide a comprehensive, universal health service – as the 2012 Health and Social Care Act did; and then drastically underfund the NHS – as the Coalition and Tory governments have done since 2010.

The CCG hopes to be able to avoid this through successfully tackling:

• Calderdale and Huddersfield hospital Trust’s  “significant overtrade”
• The CCG’s so-called Quality, Improvement, Productivity and Performance (QIPP) gap – ie their inability to cut spending.

The “overtrade is because the hospitals Trust is charging the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) more than it’s contracted to receive from them. The CCG is investigating why this is happening – possible causes are an increase in patients needing services; coding issues; and delayed transfers of care – ie inability to discharge patients because there is no convalescent or social care for them once they have left hospital.

Looking to cut spending on elective services and mental health

Calderdale CCG are short of £1.1m “cash saving” cuts and are looking for ways to cut spending through using the Right Care approach which provides a set of spending benchmarks ( and is not the same as the Right Care Right Time Right Place hospital cuts proposals). They are looking to cut spending on elective services and mental health, according to the June 30th Finance and Performance Committee Meeting Minutes.

If you think this is all a VERY BAD IDEA, please tell your MP and Councillors. And get in touch with CK999 or one of the other organisations in the CK999 network and help us campaign to stop and reverse NHS Cuts and sell offs.