This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
Preventive care outside hospitals must improve
A new report from the Public Accounts Committee has warned that hospitals, GPs, community services and social care need to work together more effectively to help reduce emergency admissions.
Despite the NHS’s efforts to reduce emergency admissions, the committee stresses that it is ‘lamentable’ that nearly 1.5 million people could have avoided emergency admissions in last year if services had worked together more effectively.
The committee also says that NHS England needs to deliver on its five-year plan to move care into the community and out of hospitals, which is overdue, expressing frustration that NHS England and partners are making progress in reducing the impact of emergency admissions for patients and hospitals but no impact on reducing the numbers of admissions that could have been avoided.
Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: "The consequences of government’s failure to properly fund and coordinate preventive health care and social care are laid bare in this report. Around a quarter of emergency admissions to hospital could and should have been avoided. That they were not further threatens the ability of cash-strapped hospitals to cope with demand and risks harm to patients through, for example, unnecessary overnight stays or the postponement of operations.
“The benefits of work to reduce the impact of emergency admissions will inevitably be limited until hospitals, GPs, community services and social care work better together to drive down the level of avoidable admissions. NHS England and NHS Improvement must take a lead here and move swiftly to better understand the stresses across the health and social care sectors and their implications.
“A priority must be to properly identify the impact of measures intended to reduce emergency admissions and explain how this information will be used to target scarce resources effectively. The financial challenges facing the NHS and adult social care are well-documented and it is critical that taxpayers’ money is spent on what works best."
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