Funding lacking for occupational health service

The Devon and Cornwall occupational health service has admitted to running on a ‘year to year basis’ and has questioned NHS England to clarify where and how funding will be made available.

In April, Devon Doctors overtook providing the service for GPs and implemented a self-funding scheme offering GPs support for £150 a year.

Chris Wright, Devon Doctors’ chief executive, told Pulse: “We’re running on a year to year basis. So we expect to be able to provide it for next year. Obviously we’ll look and see how many people are contributing in to the service, we’ll look and see if there’s any additional money coming in from the centre, and we’ll be putting our own money in to subsidise this as well. Because it is important, it has saved careers.

“We are planning on going for one more year 2016/17 – but that uses up all funding we had available to maintain this initiative.”

Discussing the £5 million staff health and welfare investment announced in September, Wright added: “We don’t know if the funding from NHS England’s practitioner health programme will come to us, or a separate scheme. It would be helpful to know, and to get guidance on exactly what that money is going to be spent on, what type of initiative it will be and what process we will have to go through to bid for that money. But we don’t know.”

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