Been a bit of an odd week, this week. One I'll remember for a while. You will see from the announcements that we are now in a position to make a statement about the future of the offender health programme in the West Midlands. If you haven't seen the letter, you can view it here. 

As I have alluded to before there is going to be a lot of rumour about what is going on.  Hopefully I can make what I know clear here.  It is sad that the offender programme as we know it is ending.  I have been involved in the West Midlands offender programme for what will be 5.5 years by the end of March 11.  However all that has been confirmed as ending is the work undertaken by us in the Strategic Health Authority, and as many of you know all of the Strategic Health Authority will cease by 2012.

The front line work continues, there remain prisons in the region, multi-agency teams working across the region delivering services in prisons and in the community. None...

This is just a quick post to remind you that we are here and working, after one weeks break I am back and picking up on the policy decisions and options on the way forward. Currently the challenge is that rumours and gossip continue to fill the vaccum of real substance on the way forward in the NHS. I have mentioned some of this and provided web links in previous posts.  I need to work through a lot of e-mails, once I have done this I'll be back on stream with this website.  We have given all day on the 9th of August to developing this site. A week to go and then hopefully we launch.  Sorry this is a short posting, but we are busy just catching up.  David.,

In the last post I mentioned some of the changes in current government policy.  One of the current challenges for many of us is that a lot of the details about the future structure of the NHS are not known.  When things are unknown, it is easy to fill those voids with ideas and best guesses about what will happen.  Over the last few weeks I have tried to avoid best guessing what will happen. 

Today, the Department of Health, published a consultation document, Liberating the NHS; Commissioning for Patients, this document proposes structures and responsibilities for the NHS Commissioning Board and GP consortiums.  The consulation suggests that there will be a statutory responsibility for the NHS Commissioning Board to commission services that include prison health.

This is good news for us, in that some of the future is becoming clearer. If it is agreed, then I expect that implementing it in the West Midlands...