The education and training aspect of the Health and Social Care Bill has, to some extent, been overshadowed by the much more headline-friendly changes in commissioning, the management cull and the debate surrounding competition. If you ask trainees, their overwhelming concern is the conflict of interest that will arise when training and service budgets are held by the same NHS trusts. Losing deaneries means that there will be no regional bodies to hold trusts to account when, as looks inevitable in the economic climate, training budgets gradually get chipped away by service demands.
Far from addressing this head on, the Future Forum recommendations deviated little from the original plan, suggesting essentially only that there should be a prolonged transition period to allow transfer of deanery functions to new local skills networks. Indeed, it says a lot that one of the headline recommendations was simply to rename "local skills networks" as "Local NHS Education & Training Boards".
Given trainees are one of the groups most profoundly affected by these reforms, it is a little surprising that no trainees were represented in the Future Forum group on education & training. Have trainees missed another important opportunity to influence our own future?
Perhaps there really were no trainees willing to take part. Or is there an argument that expecting trainees to debate constructively on changing training structures is overly optimistic? After all, if you were putting together a group to “pause, listen, reflect and improve” on Christmas, would you invite turkeys to the “Yuletide Future Forum”?
