The Health and Care Act 2022 (HCA) received royal assent on 28 April 2022. Out goes much of the framework for a managed competitive market economy. In come new statutory bodies - a revamped NHS England and all-new NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to take over commissioning (from 1 July 2022) from CCGs and also (progressively) NHS England too.
The Health and Care Act 2022 (HCA) received royal assent on 28 April 2022. Out goes much of the framework for a managed competitive market economy. In come new statutory bodies - a revamped NHS England and all-new NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to take over commissioning (from 1 July 2022) from CCGs and also (progressively) NHS England too.
NHS England and ICBs will expect providers to work in new ways to meet the challenges facing health and social care. Provider reform will be as significant as NHS leadership and commissioning reform, but through partnership and collaboration of existing NHS trusts, foundation trusts, VCSE and independent sector, rather than HCA dissolution of existing bodies and establishment of new bodies.
NHS trusts are here to stay. Gone is the statutory imperative for them to become FTs. Instead the HCA confirms the Secretary of State’s power to establish new NHS trusts; puts NHS trusts and FTs on the same regulatory footing for provider licences; and even enables NHS trusts (in effect) to acquire FTs.
The FT legal framework remains largely intact. In some respects their autonomy has been brought into line with NHS trusts, including provisions for joint exercise of powers, wider effect of decisions and (subject to safeguards) capital spending limits.
For NHS trusts and FTs, perhaps the most significant HCA and related innovations are:
How might NHS providers take advantage of innovations? Place-based partnerships are expected to comprise providers operating within (typically) a local authority area or similar footprint. Provider collaboratives are expected to comprise acute and mental health providers operating across multiple places which may together be a system or multiple systems.
There is plenty of scope for flexible design of partnerships and collaborations, but there is also a fixed policy deadline of 1 April 2023 by when they must be in place, so the next year 2022-23 is an opportunity to be grabbed not only to develop such arrangements but also to run them in trial mode before they are load bearing.
We are already working with clients around the country on partnerships and collaborations. Key issues on which we are supporting them include:
One of the aims of policy underlying NHS legal reform has been to cut out complexity and bureaucracy of existing workaround arrangements, but in developing new arrangements, there are real risks of substituting new for old complexity and bureaucracy.
Our legal support for partnerships and collaborations enables clients to cut through to what really needs to be done, so they can keep arrangements simple, have clear responsibilities and accountabilities, and are ready to take advantage of NHS legal reform to put them in control of service provision.
The BMA is advising all NHS / HSCNI consultants to ensure extra-contractual work is paid at the BMA minimum recommended rate and to decline offers of extra-contractual work that doesn't value them appropriately.
NHS England has published (October 2022) new guidance - Assuring and supporting complex change: Statutory transactions, including mergers and acquisitions.
NHS England has issued an updated (publication 11 October 2022) suite of Complex Change guidance about how it will assure and support proposals for complex change that are reportable to it. New and (where it is still in force) existing Complex Change guidance are as follows.
Created at the end of the Brexit transition period, Retained EU Law is a category of domestic law that consists of EU-derived legislation retained in our domestic legal framework by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. This was never intended to be a permanent arrangement as parliament promised to deal with retained EU law through the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill (the “Bill”).
It is clear that the digital landscape, often termed cyberspace, is a man-made environment, in which human behaviour dominates and where technology both influences and aids our role in it — through the internet, telecoms and networked computer systems, which are often interdependent. The extent to which any organisation is potentially vulnerable to cyber-attack depends on how well these elements are aligned.
In Mogane v Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) considered whether it was fair to dismiss a nurse as redundant on the basis that that her fixed-term contract was due to expire before that of her colleague.
Three months on from the commencement of the new statutory Integrated Care Systems (ICS) Anja Beriro and Gerrard Hanratty reflect on the main themes and issues that have come from the new relationship between local government and health.
The majority of people do not feel the need to embellish their CV to get that coveted position and move on up the career ladder. Their worthiness and benefit to the hiring organisation are easily demonstrated through the recruitment process – application, psychometric testing, selection day or interview.
On Saturday 15 October a wave of light swept the internet when thousands of people flooded social media with pictures of candles to remember the babies that they have lost. This event signifies the end of Baby Loss Awareness Week which aims to break the silence that is associated with baby loss in pregnancy and infancy.
The Coronavirus Act 2020 allowed any registered medical practitioner to sign a medical certificate of cause of death (“MCCD”), even if the deceased was not attended to during his or her last illness and not seen after death, provided that the medical practitioner could state the cause of death to the best of their knowledge and belief.
In our latest Shared Insights session, Focus on Emergency Medicine, chaired by Jennifer Fagin and Amelia Newbold, we were pleased to be joined by: Dr Alex Crowe, Deputy Director Incentive Schemes & Academic Partnerships, NHS Resolution and Consultant Nephrologist and Miss Susie Hewitt MBE, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust.
Browne Jacobson has been ranked as a Top Tier law firm in 25 key practice areas in Legal 500 UK 2023, the independent directory of comparative law firm performance. The firm also continues to underpin its status as one of the leading law firms in the East Midlands region with 16 Tier 1 rankings.
On 7 July this year, NHS England published its statutory guidance for Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and with it set out the ICBs’ role and responsibilities and how they should collaborate, interact and carry out their anti-fraud, bribery and corruption functions in concert with NHS England.
The Chancellor’s recent mini-budget provided a significant announcement for business as it was confirmed that the off-payroll working rules (known as “IR35”) put in place for public and private sector businesses from 2017 and 2021 will be scrapped from April 2023.
This case provides a reminder to contracting authorities that whilst the bar for an award of damages in procurement cases is high, following the Supreme Court ruling in Energy Solutions EU Ltd v Nuclear Decommissioning Authority [2017] 1 WLR 1373, it is not insurmountable when a contracting authority has acted with disregard to the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCRs). There is also further guidance as to the use of frameworks
Welcome to our August edition of Public Matters, our monthly round-up of legal updates, news and insights for the public sector.
