A new NHS strategy published by the Department of Health places emphasis on improving quality and productivity through ongoing service reforms.
According to NHS 2010-2015: from good to great. Preventative, people-centred, productive, the key priorities for managing the impending NHS budget cutbacks are protecting patients, supporting clinical staff, shifting resources to the frontline and cutting back bureaucracy.
The measures outlined include:
• A new payment system that links hospital income to patient satisfaction, rising to 10% of payments over time.
• Dedicated one-to-one carers for patients with cancer or serious long-term conditions.
• Plans to offer frontline staff an employment guarantee in return for flexibility, mobility and pay restraint.
• More freedom for successful hospitals to expand their services into the community, including GP centres.
• Personal care plans and health budgets, enabling patients to choose how and where they will be treated.
• A legal right to an 18-week waiting time for treatment after GP referral (two weeks for cancer patients).
• A legal right for everyone aged 40–74 to an NHS Health Check every five years to assess their risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: “For the NHS to become truly great, it must become more preventative and people-centred. This means top quality care is our goal and patient safety our top priority. Quality care is not always about spending more money, but about spending it in the right places. Moving care from hospitals into homes and communities is better for patients and more efficient.”
Burnham also stated that “where there is underperformance and the NHS is an incumbent provider, we will give the NHS the first opportunity to improve to the level of the best” – but that this did not mean “freezing out the independent sector”. Partnership working is a core theme.
Peter Ellingworth, Chief Executive of the Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI), said: “ABHI strongly endorses the Secretary of State’s statement that ‘meeting the productivity challenge is crucial to continued success’. Industry is used to this productivity challenge and recognises the need to work in different ways with the NHS in this new financial climate.”
Noting that the new strategy requires the NHS to work with industry as a partner, developing a business-to-business relationship, Ellingworth said: “We look forward to demonstrating how technology can help keep costs down as we develop a deeper relationship with the NHS along the lines set out by the Secretary of State.”
Eucomed, the European medtech industry association, welcomed the strategy’s emphasis on the role of innovation: finding new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease will be crucial, the report notes, in the challenging financial climate ahead.
John Wilkinson, Chief Executive of Eucomed, said: “Medical technology manufacturers have the power to provide patients, hospitals and community care settings with innovative and cost-effective solutions which address current and future health and economic challenges.”
He noted the emphasis placed by the report on shifting health services into the community: “This increasing demand for new or adapted goods and services is a great opportunity for innovative companies to design high-quality products which help reduce the burden of healthcare systems.”
Peter Ellingworth John Wilkinson