This month has seen a continuation of the transfer between several health related procedures and powers from the central public health system to local offices, managed by local governments according to the Department of Health website. This has in turn brought a lot of benefits, but also some anxiety. So far, it seems like the local officials are quite happy with the situation, but the public health organization may hold most of the anxiety
This transition has been going on for the last couple of years, but only recently has there been so many changes. Now, some think that it may be time to look at what has been done, and how the whole process could be improved. There has certainly been successes, but some things could be changed. There were problems in how some of the responsibilities have been transferred over, with no real idea of who exactly would be responsible for these new tasks.
So far, the local authorities have built upon what was achieved by the central government, and provides some of the same services that were available before, but many in the health system are not convinced of how well this process is going. There are services that still lack some basic elements, and community groups in particular may be ill served under the new regime. The health minister is having some concerns, but says that the transfer will go on, and things will be rectified as it goes along.
There are a lot of new resources that were invested in this process, and a number of associations have been involved in consultations and people have been doing their best to transfer this system over, but when the process eventually came not everything was as seen. For example, organizations like FPA and Brook gained access to fewer resources than expected. However, the global sums transferred were much higher.
Investments of public funds is a major issue and can be very thorny between the various governments and offices. Allocations are often sent out based on the needs that each office has, but as more local governments gain more responsibilities, they are also duty bound to dictate how much funds they need, which may be hard for the central office to know whether the figures are right or not.
Meanwhile, prevention often works out to be the first thing that suffers from a lack of funding, and nationally a good deal of funds are not flexible enough to be rerouted to the needy areas. This brings the local directors more in control over the funds, but less able to direct them appropriately. This has good and bad implications, but it is unknown as of yet whether the patients will be better off.
New guidance has since been provided from the Department of Health for how directors should handle these issues, including how flexible they should be to the need of certain groups. Hopefully with those, it should ease the process over.
