DOH: Our health, our care, our say: making it happen - Essay Example

The British government in their endeavour to provide more effective healthcare to “people,” brought out a White Paper on the subject in January 2006. The Paper includes policies and plans intended to give a “new direction for social care,” to deliver “what people want and expect of services in the 21st century.” The White Paper named “Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services” primarily sets out four goals to realize the objectives. These are: The goals entail revamping of the system that was in place, and tuning the administrative machinery to work according to new plans.

This also calls for de-centralising many of the apex level Government functions, and for gearing up the NHS (National Health Service) to meet the challenges of working in co-ordination with other extended arms of the Government, “social enterprises and other third sector providers.” Subsequently, the Department of Health brought out a report in October 2006, named “Our health, our care, our say: making it happen,” reporting activities that followed the decision to implement the recommendations in the White Paper.

This document gives an “update on progress on implementation (of the goals in the White Paper) to date against those goals and a brief forward look to the next stages.” This report was issued for the information of those associated with the project and also to serve as a “resource support” for implementation. Activities at the local level start with consultations initiated by the leading team, with the public, for generating supplementary inputs to be used for improved service design and development.

The leading teams in different localities comprise officials from the departments of Public health and Social services, Chief Executives of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) of the localities concerned, and