The Health Foundation's response to Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS
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Background
Published in July 2010, the NHS White Paper sets out the Coalition Government's long-term vision for the future of the NHS. The vision builds on the core values and principles of the NHS and sets out how they plan to:
- put patients at the heart of everything the NHS does
- focus on continuously improving those things that really matter to patients - the outcome of their healthcare
- empower and liberate clinicians to innovate, with the freedom to focus on improving healthcare services.
The Health Foundation’s response
In our response we welcome the Government’s focus on putting patients at the centre of health services and agree that it is right to focus on quality and outcomes. We argue that this will best be achieved by:
- changing relationships between people and services so that patients become ‘activated’ playing a much greater role in their own health and able to share decision making
- transforming the way we inspire improvement through clinicians, with new models of professionalism being developed and adopted
- transforming organisational approaches to patient safety – creating leadership in patient safety and continuous quality improvement aligned across all health services and embedded in all processes
We argue that external drivers of change such as regulation, economic incentives and performance management are important but that they need to be balanced by internal drivers such as professionalism, leadership, skills and organisational development which can often prove to be stronger motivators.
In response to the proposed GP commissioning arrangements we state that they will give clinicians a welcome overview of the whole patient pathway. We do however recognise the very considerable challenges during the transition.
The Health Foundation's work in the Isle of Wight and Sheffield shows that commissioners will be more successful if consortia are resourced to make sound, fair and strategic decisions that follow systematic, evidence-based, transparent processes.
