The Health Foundation responds to the White Paper
The Health Foundation has responded to the White Paper consultation ‘Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS’.
The Health Foundation welcomes the focus on putting patients at the centre of health services and its commitment to empowering professionals and providers, saying it is right to focus on quality and outcomes.
In order to make its vision a reality, the Health Foundation proposes that the Government must:
- change relationships between people and services so that patients are equipped to play a much more active role in their own health and able to share decision making
- transform the way we inspire improvement through clinicians, with new models of professionalism being developed and adopted
- transform organisational approaches to patient safety – creating leadership in patient safety and continuous quality improvement aligned across all health services and embedded in all processes.
Proposing that ‘patient safety is placed above all else at the heart of the NHS’, is also welcomed. However, there is a real risk that this emphasis upon patient safety may be lost in the new system setup.
The response points out that it is only possible to achieve high quality care for every person, every time, if all levels of the system are aligned and relate to each other to support initiatives to improve quality – from individual interactions with service users right through to national-level interventions.
We have also responded to the following consultations:
