The backlash from NHS staff culminating #ImInWorkJeremy shows how carefully politicians need to tread when advocating reform of the NHS. But the pressing and urgent need for reform is going to intensify as this Parliament wears on.
Even with the extra £8bn of funding announced in George Osborne’s Budget earlier this month, the task facing Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the NHS, is huge. The health service must find £22bn of efficiency savings over the next five years, an unprecedented target not just in terms of the NHS, but for any western health service.
Reform will have to sit at the heart of any plan to achieve this. Indeed, Stevens’ NHS Five Year Forward View sets out a range of reforms which will help us get there including the integration of health and social care and better use of new technologies. But crucial to the success of the Forward View will be the NHS’s ability to empower patients.
Patient empowerment has been an aim of the system for over fifteen years. But as more and more people suffer from complex long-term conditions the majority of care will occur not in the hospital or GP‘s surgery, but at home. By 2025 the number of people with complex long-term conditions will be more than 18 million. Patients and their family taking on the carers role will be the ones making the difficult decisions. If these decisions are good ones, demand on the service will go down. Get them wrong and it will increase. Indeed, the evidence suggests that around one in five emergency admissions to hospital are potentially preventable.
Existing empowerment initiatives – which Stevens’ NHS Five Year Forward View focus on – such as ‘voice’ and ‘choice’ won’t change this. They empower people only after or as they are entering the health service. New empowerment models being pioneered across the country create good health, rather than respond to ill health. These initiatives include giving doctors the ability to prescribe social rather than just medical treatments (cooking classes, gym memberships and community social groups), creating peer networks among those with similar chronic conditions, and working with patients to set technology enabled care plans, which help patients make decisions remotely and allow more flexible contact with healthcare professionals.
The challenge now for the NHS is how to ensure that every patient who could benefit from these empowerment initiatives can have access to them. IPPR is recommending a transformation fund for the NHS – something backed up by recent work by the Health Foundation and the Kings Fund. This would help spread reform and prevent extra funding being used for steady-state or business as usual.
More money should also be passed over to patients directly in the form of personalised budgets, with patients holding the purse strings. At the moment, less than half a million people benefit from personal budgets but by 2020, IPPR argues that all patients with a long-term condition should be offered one.
And finally, more money and finance should be devolved to the local level. ‘Devo-Manc’ is a good start, but the government promised ‘devolution on demand’ and demand there is. Notably, the ten core cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow – recently published ‘A Modern Charter for Local Freedom’ which expressed an interest in following suit. NHS England should start thinking about when and how it will meet this demand now: devolution of this kind can make care more responsive to local populations and should galvanise empowerment focussed reform.
These changes won’t be easy; but they are absolutely necessary. As Alan Milburn’s argues: “Tinkering with change will not save the NHS. It must stop treating patients as passive by-standers and instead enlist them as active agents of change.”
Harry Quilter-Pinner, co-author of Powerful Patients published by IPPR.
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