NHS Direct plans 15 per cent cuts
NHS Direct, the 24-hour telephone advice organisation for the NHS in England, is likely to be slimmed-down because demand for its services is less than had been expected.
The service is proposing to close 12 of its call centres and transfer
their work to the remaining 54 centres, 18 of which will be expanded.
The organisation’s directorates will also be restructured. The
plan has been announced to staff for consultation until mid-August.
The consultation document (PDF 2.5MB) says that 573 posts are at risk
of redundancy with a further 215 being lost by natural wastage. Overall,
the changes
are expected to lead to 376 vacancies, leaving a net loss of 412 posts.
NHS Direct currently has 2,796 posts.
The number of nurse advisers NHS Direct employs will fall, but the number
of less qualified health advisers is expected to rise.
NHS Direct does not employ pharmacist advisers to speak to callers. Instead
it refers people, where appropriate, to local community pharmacies.
Anne Joshua, national pharmaceutical adviser to NHS Direct, said that
she would like NHS Direct to be able to transfer calls to community pharmacists
where appropriate. But she recognised that pharmacists have concerns
about how they would deal with the conflicting demands of telephone call
transfers from NHS Direct while working in a busy dispensary and dealing
with customer enquiries.
NHS 24, the equivalent of NHS Direct in Scotland, employs a team of part-time
pharmacist advisers to handle calls themselves.
“I am watching the Scottish model carefully,” Mrs Joshua
said.
However, she added that NHS Direct is more interested in working with
existing community pharmacy services and other NHS providers than in
providing services
itself.
“There is a limit to what you can do over the telephone,” she
said, adding that it might be good to be able to refer people with complex
medication problems to community pharmacists for medicines use review,
for
example.
NHS 24 has a number of vacancies for pharmacists at the moment (see pA25). |
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