For the last eighteen months I have been on a rollercoaster of activity and change. I am the inaugural chair of one of Britain’s largest primary care trusts, Central Liverpool PCT. It has a budget of £300 million, a staff of 1,300, it serves a population of 260,000, and is situated within some of the most disadvantaged and diverse wards in the country.
PCTs have a range of complex responsibilities: delivering primary and community care; commissioning hospital care; planning local health services as the main local NHS fund-holder; and improving public health and tackling inequalities.
Building the organisation from scratch to tackle these tasks in focused and innovative ways has been a demanding test of skills of strategic vision, institutional leadership and working with partners.
We have developed new forms of recruitment to bring the local unemployed and black and minority communities into the NHS through intermediate labour market and positive action training schemes. We are creating new types of healthcare workers, innovative nursing posts and a health inequality resource centre.
We have developed new initiatives for school and college students to encourage them towards a range of careers in the NHS. We are working with a range of partners (council, education, housing) to establish new joined-up initiatives and premises that link health to other local regeneration opportunities. We have established a ‘Community Chest for Health’ scheme, which has provided small grants to 30 grassroots voluntary groups.
This is just a flavour of the exhilarating pace of change within this new organisation: with significant extra government funding for the NHS, major public and political interest and a huge programme of radical change, the Primary Care Trust is certainly the place to be.