This item was published during the term of a previous administration that ended in April 2007
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Specialist health services become national resource
30/01/2006
Patients across Scotland will benefit from eight newly designated national services, it was announced today.
The services provide highly specialised treatment and will be funded jointly by all NHS health boards in Scotland.
They include inpatient psychiatry for children under 12 at Yorkhill Hospital, Glasgow; a National Managed Clinical Network for Acquired Brain Injury, Edinburgh; and Advanced Interventions/neurosurgery for severe mental disorder at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee.
Health Minister Andy Kerr said:
"I am delighted that these eight services will become National Services from April this year and will benefit patients across the country.
"The treatment provided by each of these services is highly specialised, intensive, expensive to provide and required by a relatively small number of people with very specific conditions. It therefore makes sense for the work to be commissioned and funded on a national basis.
"We made clear in 'Delivering for Health' - our long-term vision for the NHS - that services should be as local as possible and as specialised as necessary. These services clearly fall into the latter category - and concentrating them as a national resource is good for patients and good for clinicians.
"NHS Boards have worked together to improve patient services and increase the efficiency of the health service in Scotland."
Full list of the new National Services:
- Inpatient psychiatry for children under 12, Yorkhill Hospital, Glasgow
- Complex airways management in children, Yorkhill Hospital
- Obstetric brachial plexus surgery, Yorkhill Hospital. Brachial Plexus injury in children is most commonly a complication of difficult childbirth and results from the stretching of the complex of nerves that supply the upper limb as they emerge from the neck
- Adult alternative stem cell transplantation, Glasgow Royal Infirmary
- Adult congenital heart disease, Western Infirmary, Glasgow
- National Managed Clinical Network for Acquired Brain Injury, Edinburgh
- Advanced Interventions/neurosurgery for severe mental disorder, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee
- National Managed Clinical Network for the Scottish Genital Anomalies Network, Yorkhill Hospital leading
The services are already part of NHSScotland, and there will be no change to the location on which each of them is provided. They will be designated as national services with effect April 1, 2006. The recommendations were made by the National Services Advisory Group and approved by NHS Board Chief Executives.
National Services are low volume, high cost services of a very specialised nature which it makes sense to commission on a Scotland-wide basis.
Money to fund National Services is top-sliced from NHS Boards' unified budgets.
A Managed Clinical Network is a way of providing a service which brings together all the health professionals involved, gives patients and the voluntary sector a voice in the delivery of the service and which operates across traditional boundaries between primary, secondary and tertiary care.