06 March 2015

North Staffs Update: CCG decision completely at odds with NHS England's Five Year Forward View

Local people diagnosed with ‘mild’ hearing loss will no longer qualify for NHS support after North Staffordshire Clinical Commissioning Group announced they will ration care to cut costs. 

Patients with ‘moderate’ hearing loss will be asked to fill in a form to determine if they can have NHS support for their hearing loss. The eligibility criteria have been designed locally and not been subjected to any public consultation. The CCG has yet to release an impact assessment and there is no evidence it has assessed how its decisions might impact on health inequalities, despite its obligations to do so.

Commenting on the development, North Staffs CCG Chair Mark Shapely has claimed in local newspaper The Sentinel that 40 percent of hearing aids issued on the NHS were never used.  However the Chair has not provided any evidence of this and appears to have selected the most pessimistic estimates of non-use reported in the literature – with some experts noting hearing aid non-use can be as low as 5%.

NCHA Statement on North Staffs:

David Hewlett, Chief Executive of the NCHA, said: “If what Mark Shapley says is correct about hearing aid use in his area, North Staffordshire CCG should be deeply ashamed.  Rather than rationing  access, they should be working with providers to commission and audit the services patients need and use as both NHS England and Monitor recommend.  However, like so much that has happened at North Staffordshire , it is likely that the statement in The Sentinel is based on outdated generalisations and urban myth.  The local Observation and Scrutiny Committee, Healthwatch, non-commissioning GPs and MPs should all be up in arms and tackling the CCG in its poor approach to commissioning which is completely at odds with NHS England's Five Year Forward View.   A good external audit by the National Audit Office might do local people more good than inappropriate commissioning masquerading as public good.”

If readers have any questions about hearing aid compliance research please contact NCHA Head of Policy Harjit Sandhu.