This may all turn out to be a waste of time.
I was at a meeting this evening of county wide NHS bods, various chief execs, trust managers, armies of GPs and local consortia leads in waiting. Now, the jargon bit:
Someone asked if the TUPE regulations apply to when the PCTs are dismantled and the consortia take things over. TUPE means anybody who works within the NHS means their post (inc pay, role, rights etc) is protected, regardless of what happens to their organisation. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the nub of it. The answer came from the local LMC guy, who'd been at a local GPC/BMA meeting where they consulted the BMA lawyers (translation: important local GP in political terms meets with lawyers employed by national GP organisation for legal advice).
The answer to this was "Yes, TUPE applies".
Now, this makes the whole thing completely pointless. Consortia have 3 choices:
1. Keep the whole PCT with the same people on the same terms. Business as usual. Nothing has changed. Everything costs the same, but the route that the money takes has changed.
2. Scorched earth. Don't have anything to do with the PCT and employ a completely new body of people who have no idea what the whole thing is about. Build it from the ground up, spend a fortune on training, compensating for inefficiencies, development etc.
3. Force the PCTs hands to make massive redundancies. The cost of those redundancies completely fuck the PCT management budget which is already being aggressively cut. This means when the consortia take over they inherit a massive deficit and spend god knows how much public money on redundancy packages.
Only option 1 makes any sense. Which basically "everything stay the same."
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