by Dr Thomas Oakley, Chief Executive
The new Government has wasted no time in setting out its new agenda. Just over two months after its election, it has published a landmark review into NHS performance led by Lord Ara Darzi and it has committed to a policy of out-of-hospital care and technology. We will learn more when the Secretary of State addresses his Party conference next week.
The review superbly marshals a great range of evidence to reach clear conclusions. First, the NHS care model must change towards community-based practice. Successive governments have promised to do it “but in practice, the reverse has happened … The result is that NHS has implemented the inverse of its stated strategy.”
Second, the NHS remains in the foothills of digital transformation: “the last decade was a missed opportunity to prepare the NHS for the future”. Third, the basic NHS structure is right but needs reinvigoration through a new approach to workforce, technology and capital investment.
Two sections of the report stood out for me in particular. The first rightly describes how difficult falling productivity can feel for staff:
By the same logic, freeing clinicians from administrative inefficiency will be hugely motivating. It will help to deliver the review’s first thematic conclusion, to re-engage staff (“their talents must be harnessed to make positive change”).
Second, the changes in the disease burden mean that technology must work to join up primary, secondary and community care. Keir Starmer emphasised this in his speech at the launch.
He said that government is working “at pace” towards a new ten-year plan. That plan will be framed around three “big shifts”: “first, moving from an analogue to a digital NHS. A tomorrow service not just a today service. Second, we’ve got to shift more care from hospitals to communities. And third, we’ve got to be much bolder in moving from sickness to prevention.”
Clearly my team and I stand ready to help. As we have already shown, moving from analogue to digital communication between clinicians, via our Bleepa platform, has highly significant benefits for staff, patients and the region’s wider care system. These include shorter average referral times, time savings for staff, shorter length of stay for patients, and savings to the system from both a trust and ICB perspective.
Most important of all, however, is the shift to community-based care. As the Darzi report says, without this, the NHS will find it all but impossible to recover.
Funding will be key. One of the review’s thematic recommendations gets it exactly right:
In our sector, that means capital funding for technology enabling remote pathways, delivery in community and asynchronous working. There is no existing infrastructure to facilitate this transition, and it will need to be put in place before effective community-based care can be delivered.
Bleepa can deliver a common digital care record across providers and the ability to track and report activity so that it can underpin new models of payment for new models of care. What remains is a mandate for adoption and funding. With that support, a common care record could be deployed nationally in days, with individual allied provider settings joining up in months rather than years.
This change would mean that this package of NHS reform would get traction and succeed, where previous governments have failed.
To give the last word to Lord Darzi: