NHS England head calls for redesign of care for patients

Speaking to delegates at the NHS Annual Conference in Liverpool, Simon Stevens emphasised the importance of putting the NHS on a financially sustainable footing, redesigning care, and getting serious about prevention as his three main priorities. He called for fellow NHS leaders to ‘rattle the cage and advocate something different’.
 
Stevens said: "We need to redesign the way our urgent care system works. The current system is confusing the public. We have to do a better job of joining it up. We need to simplify the urgent care spaghetti so we can manage the demands being placed on us.

"We need to get a big national conversation going about the role of schools, hospitals, local authorities and central government. Time is not on our side but it is change for a purpose, a high purpose, and we have 54 million people with us."
 
The conference also head Stevens issue a call for parts of the country to step forward to be urgent care vanguards, testing new approaches to delivering urgent care that aim to improve the coordination of services and reduce pressure on A&E departments. As with the wider vanguard programme, NHS England will work with the vanguard sites to develop new approaches, helping them identify opportunities and to tackle barriers to make it easier for change to happen faster.
 
Stevens announced how North Cumbria, Essex and North, East and West Devon will form the part of the new Success Regime. The aim is to improve care and sustainability of services for patients. The three areas are facing some of the most significant challenges in England.

Addressing an increase in funding, Mr Stevens said the proposed costing, set out by the RCGP, was a ‘compelling one’, adding that general practice would also have to work more efficiently in new care models such as multi-speciality community providers and GP federations.

He said: ‘We have sometimes been pennywise and pound-foolish and that is nowhere more evident than in our relative under-investment in primary care, general practice. I think that the case that the RCGP makes for investment in general practice, sizing that as at least a third of a billion pounds of savings in offset demand flowing up to hospitals in the short term is a compelling one.’

Read more