Payment Protection Insurance Policy Answers
The 1989 White Paper �Working for Patients� was the Conservative�s attempt to improve the NHS by introducing an internal market system.��The White Paper resulted in The�NHS & Community Care Act 1990 and the 1991 NHS Reforms.�As a result, the roles of the Department of Health, Regional Health Authorities and Health Authorities changed as more decisions were being made at local level.��The Family Practitioner Committees were now called Family Health Service Authorities and they worked with District Health Authorities to administer primary care services.��Health Authorities would now stop running hospitals directly and would need to ‘purchase’ healthcare with budgets from �providers� (acute hospitals, special homes for the elderly, mentally ill, or ambulance services). Some GPs had smaller similar budgets to purchase some care.��To be a �provider�, Payment Protection Insurance Policy health organisations had to be NHS Trusts which would compete with each other and by 1995 all health services were provided by these Trusts.��This system is based on the system in the�United States, and supporter�s claim that is it more cost efficient as the Trusts are in competition so lower costs result.��It also gave trusts more control over buying and selling property, and by 1997, through going into partnership with private companies and hospitals, 14 new hospitals had been built.��Supporters also claim that it gives fund holders better choice of what services to �purchase�, Payment Protection Insurance Policy and gives hospital managers more flexibility in paying, hiring and sacking staff so services remain efficient.��There was however criticism that it was a shift towards a private health system and that the �free for all� initiative was being overridden.��Critics also claimed that more public money had been used to buy private services (at higher cost), hospitals found caring for elderly too expensive so services reduced, that the numbers of managerial staff (on high wages) had increased (by 10,000 in 3 years) while the numbers of medical staff had fallen, and that many services were duplicated creating unnecessary cost.��The objectives of �Working for Patients� also included involving clinicians in controlling budgets, and introducing an auditing system and a system to assess the quality of treatments in different areas.��Despite all these changes to the structure of the NHS, costs increased from just over �775.4 million in 1991-1992, to �1,045 million in 1994 (cited from �The Guardian�, 6 June 1995). Payment Protection Insurance Policy
