Children's trusts could "morph" into health and wellbeing boards, calming fears that efforts to join up services for children and young people are being undermined, health experts claim.
The news comes as councils begin developing plans for the statutory boards, which must be up and running by April 2012. The remit of the boards was first announced in the public health white paper Healthy Lives, Healthy People, which Health Secretary Andrew Lansley published in November last year.
Leading sector figures warned last year that the government's decision to remove the duty on councils to set up children's trust boards will damage relationships built up across agencies. But proposals to introduce health and wellbeing boards have been hailed as a means of helping to integrate health and children's services.
Lorraine O'Reilly, programme director of the Commissioning Support Programme, which works with England's 152 children's trusts, said that shifting trusts into health boards would be an easy option for many councils.
"I suspect that a large number of local authorities will take what was their children's trust or local strategic partnership and morph that into the health and wellbeing board," she explained.
Jo Webber, deputy policy director at the NHS Confederation, said it is likely that children's trusts will change into health and wellbeing boards in some localities.
"Different areas are going to have different attitudes to this, probably based on whether their children's trust has worked well," she said. "The main thing is to make sure that what has been gained through children's trusts isn't lost along the way."
She suggested that some councils are investigating the possibility of turning their children's trust into a sub-committee of their health and wellbeing board.
"We have concerns about the potential for fragmenting the way in which children's health services are commissioned," she said. "So having a sub-committee of the health and wellbeing board or keeping the children's trust arrangements going would obviously mitigate against that."
But Webber insisted that local authorities should avoid getting weighed down by policy directions and instead focus on maintaining and improving joint working arrangements. "I seriously don't think it matters what the structure is so long as joint commissioning of services and joint strategic needs assessment works well," she said.
Ann Baxter, chair of the Association of Directors of Children's Services health, care and additional needs committee, urged councils to maintain the successes of children's trusts.
"There is a danger that by being subsumed into the wider debates about health, the health needs of children will be lost," she said. "Moreover, children's trusts oversee the delivery of a much wider range of services for children - including planning to improve educational attainment and wellbeing - and this requires the involvement of partners who are not statutory members of the health and wellbeing boards."
However, Baxter admitted that the new boards could foster links between adult and children's services.
"There may well be service improvements as well as efficiencies to be made through joined-up planning with adult social care services as well as health partners, particularly in joining up services for families," she said.
HEALTH AND WELLBEING BOARDS AT A GLANCE
- Local authorities are set to take responsibility for public health in 2013, when around £4bn of funding will transfer from the NHS to councils
- New statutory health and wellbeing boards will have responsibility for deciding how to spend much of this cash. The main purpose of the boards will be to join up commissioning across the NHS, public health, social care and other services
- The boards will consist of a number of statutory partners, including directors of public health, directors of children's services, directors of adult services, local councillors, GP commissioners and representatives of new local HealthWatch organisations
- To guarantee joined-up commissioning at a local level, local authorities and GP consortia will both have an obligation to prepare joint strategic needs assessments through the health and wellbeing board
- Using these strategic needs assessments, all health and wellbeing boards will have to develop a high-level "joint health and wellbeing strategy" that spans the NHS, social care and public health
- These strategies will set the agenda within which commissioning plans for the NHS, social care, public health and other services are developed
- Health and wellbeing boards will not have formal decision-making rights over GP consortia, but local government will have powers to scrutinise GP consortia
- Local authorities are to be given a statutory health improvement duty to underpin their public health role
