Four themes dominated this year’s gathering of the health service clan at the NHS Confederation’s annual conference in Manchester: priorities for the new money, avoiding another winter crisis, re-energising the redesign of clinical services, and finding, keeping and training the staff to do it all.
The health and social care secretary, Jeremy Hunt, indicated the shape of the offer to be made to taxpayers over more NHS funding. It will be tied to “simple goals” on priorities such as cancer treatment, maternity, waiting time standards for mental health support and integrating health and social care.
Hunt and the NHS leadership are pinning their hopes on avoiding another winter dominated by the wholesale cancellation of elective surgery by freeing up 4,000 beds through slashing the number of long stayers. The plan is to cut the number of patients in hospital for more than three weeks by a quarter over the coming months. It is curious that there is not a parallel push to reduce inappropriate admissions of frail elderly people.
Source: Social care funding crisis leaves the NHS in limbo | Healthcare Professionals Network | The Guardian
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This appears to be a good start, but only time will tell. Within this project all aspects need to be considered be they Health, Social Care or other related areas and in each area a full consideration to all areas and sections within those areas, for to not do so will leave gaps in the research which may or may not be relevant.
In the past there has been only research in selected areas, which does not cover the big picture, which in many instances gives an incomplete picture and therefore the research, in many respects, is meaningless.
Once the big picture is established and held as the fundamental basis of the research, individual areas could be concentrated on, but always referring back to the fundamental basis.
My main area of concern is Adult Social Care and its relationship to health, but the Government appears to be of the opinion that health funding can be dealt with now and social care funding later, but this is not so as each are inter-related to the other.
There is some work progressing on intergrated care, but not enough and while they are separate organisations this will be extremely difficult to achieve and costly. The medium to long-term outlook is to fully amalgamate health and social care into one organisation where there is but one budget and each individual area is fully researched, costed and funding made available. To short change anyone area will only lead to a complete breakdown of all areas.
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