Daily Insight: Six appeal

The recently appointed CEOs of six health economies in the West Midlands have decided to set up an executive committee where decisions can be made about shared issues impacting the region, HSJ reported yesterday.

The move comes just months after integrated care boards were established and involves Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin integrated care system, Black Country ICS, Birmingham and Solihull ICS, Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS, Coventry and Warwickshire ICS and Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICS. Each system has unveiled the plans in respective board papers.

Some ICSs in the Midlands are smaller than average, due to problems attracting candidates for chief executive posts, because of fears the systems would not have sufficient scale to drive service change. A number of them also still have interim executives.

With this new committee, the senior group plans to work together on several areas where it will be “beneficial or necessary” to make joint decisions. These include primary care, 111/999 services, mutual aid on elective/cancer recovery, and ambulance handover delays.

Draft terms of reference suggest the executive committee would be accountable to respective systems and required to report back. Local authorities have not been involved in development, though chiefs say it has not been ruled out.

Moving story

The week finishes with news of a very eye-catching job change involving a senior civil servant who oversaw the £37bn Test and Trace budget.

Hamza Yusuf has moved to become a director at consultants Deloitte, which received millions of pounds for its work on the programme.

From October last year to earlier this month, he was strategic finance director at the newly formed UKHSA. From November 2020 to October 2021, he was a finance director at the Department of Health and Social Care. In that role he had, in his own words, “overall responsibility for the £37bn Test & Trace programme budget” and worked alongside senior leaders to “ensure probity of spend”.

Since the start of the pandemic Deloitte has secured Test and Trace contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The big four consultancy firm was brought in during the early days of the pandemic to set up the UK’s network of testing sites and laboratories, deploying more than 1,000 staff. By March 2021 the contracts added up to nearly £300m, according to the National Audit Office.