NHS Highland announces £100m savings plan

In a report, NHS Highland’s chief executive Elaine Mead is set to highlight the strategic direction the board must take to meet ‘unprecedented’ saving targets of around £100 million over the next three years.

Mead will outline an ageing population, changing workforce, difficulties with recruitment, staffing pressures, as well as rising costs and demands as signals that NHS Highland must accelerate changes to the way it delivers its services.

NHS Highland Strategic Quality and Sustainability Plan: 2017/18 to 2019/20 will outline both the challenges and some of the solutions - including new models of care - that will help sustain services between now and 2020.

Over the next three years it is estimated that NHS Highland will need to deliver efficiencies of around £100 million, with around £47million in 2017/18 alone (around seven per cent of its annual budget).

These seven initiatives identified for 2017/18 are themed under seven main headings: adult care; flow; new models of care; realistic medicine; drug costs; remodelling assets and Continuous Quality Improvement/local initiatives.

Elaine Mead said: “Our Quality and Sustainability Plan describes the national and local strategic context, and sets out a compelling case for change as well as NHS Highland’s approach to addressing some of the challenges.

“The plan sets out the vision and strategy through which to deliver the board’s corporate objectives.  We are putting in place seven initiatives that relate back to people, quality and care. These will support the reduction of waste, harm and unwarranted variation, allow new models of care to be further developed and  introduced and, in turn, will be more sustainable.”