Orbit’s Post

🚨 The NHS in Crisis: What's Next? 🚨 📅 14th January 2025 🕚 11:00 – 13:00 📍 Durham University Business School Join us for a compelling Panel Discussion on Lord Darzi's recent review of the NHS in England. With underfunding, long waiting lists, health inequalities, and other systemic issues, the time to address these challenges is now. 🎙️ Agenda Highlights: Insights from healthcare leaders, academics, and policymakers Expert panel featuring voices from health equity, ageing, and local government Q&A and networking opportunities Whether you're a healthcare professional, policymaker, or advocate, this is your chance to engage in the critical conversation about the future of our NHS. Don't miss this opportunity to be part of the solution. 📌 Details: Venue: The Waterside Building, Durham DH1 1SL Parking: The SANDS, 78 Freeman's Pl, Durham DH1 1SG 💡 Let’s work together to ensure a sustainable and equitable NHS for all. #Healthcare #NHS #Leadership #HealthEquity #PanelDiscussion

This week I joined the Data and Technology Working Group for the NHS 10 Year Plan for our first meeting in London. It was a great meeting and there is much to do between now and February. We've been asked to bring our networks to the table. My two big networks are #localgov and #LeedsDigital (22% of Digital Health jobs are in Leeds) so I'm asking you what your thoughts are. What does 'From analogue to digital' mean to you in the context of the NHS 10 Year Plan? During the meeting I expressed my frustration that 20 years ago I stood in Princes Exchange in #Leeds and celebrated as we did the first electronic booking of an outpatient appointment using 'Choose and Book'. Yet I can't book an appointment or chase up a first outpatient referral online now in 2024 for my son. He was referred in July, his appointment cancelled in October with no new date yet fixed and no further correspondence. Is AI really the saviour that it is made out to be? Should we focus on patient records or process flow? What about skills? Is that the real unlock? A big investment in digital specialists, digital skills for non-digital professionals and tackling digital inclusion? What of social care and public health? Does social care have the investment it needs in data and tech to keep people out of hospital? How do we finally scale innovation? What's the unlock? Will at least one of the eight meetings planned be in the North? Don't just tell me what you think here but add to the conversation online: https://lnkd.in/djg8K-nx Also Pad Burns we need to sort a session at Leeds Digital Health on this. What can Leeds bring to the 10 Year Plan? Alison Ward James Hawkins Glynn Robinson Adam Lewis Cleveland Henry Zandra Moore Dr Martin Stow Dylan Roberts Stephen Blackburn Maddie Julian MA, PGCE Phil Nixon Nic Fox David Corbett Richard Irvine Owen Pritchard Neville Young Paul Connell

As always, the key is primary care and, despite at least 30 years worth of strategies to "shift left", the proportion of spend that has gone into primary care has reduced (it was 25% in 2010/11 and only 18% in 20/21). Unsustainable primary care means more demand in secondary care not less, yet how many care provider boards focus on investing in primary care? To illustrate, between 2016 and 2022 WTE qualified GPs fell by 22% while hospital consultants grew by 25%. Until commissioners of care/integrated care providers change their view of, and relationship with, primary care, seeing them as a key part of service provision rather than an inconvenience, this won't change. The NHS Confederation in 2023 suggested that reducing acute care demand through increased primary care spending generates a significant return on investment (31%), but I'd be willing to bet that there are few plans to re-balance the proportion of spend away from acute care to any great degree in current plans, and equally willing to bet that primary care is not at the forefront of reform plans when they arrive. If this doesn't happen, i.e. a proper system based approach, there will be little real change I suspect, just more fine words.

“Lord Darzi’s report on the future of the NHS highlights some crucial issues that need to be urgently addressed. “Health inequalities have widened and as a result, we now have a population that has become less healthy, and a workforce that has become less productive. As a country, we must reprioritise our spending to address this. “This report is an excellent start to identifying key issues and I look forward to further engagement on creating long-term sustainable solutions. In particular, where difficult choices have to be made on what can and cannot be funded, we need a new process that takes public opinion into account.” Our President, Professor Gillian Leng CBE, reacts to today's report by Lord Darzi on the future of the NHS. What did you make of the report? 👉 https://lnkd.in/eNhFafsr #darzireport #nhs

An interesting piece from the Financial Times https://lnkd.in/dRRD-QR2 The NHS is at a critical juncture and the three shifts outlined by Wes Streeting are indeed crucial to the NHS’s sustainability going forward. Addressing long waits for care will need greater government focus on preventing ill health in the first place and, crucially, shifting more care outside of hospitals into the community, so that people’s conditions can be managed without the need for acute care but it remains unclear what action government will take to achieve its goal of increased efficiency in the health service. The commitment to digital transformation in healthcare and emphasizing prevention over treatment is also vital. The triumvirate of healthcare staff, data and technology are increasingly crucial to the ongoing evolution of the NHS and wider healthcare as systems looks to work in more efficient ways, improve diagnosis and treatment and improve services. However, transforming the NHS into a leader in global healthcare innovation will require significant investment and a culture shift to deliver a truly digitally mature NHS along with a connected health and care system where information can flow safely and seamlessly between IT systems, care providers and settings. On balancing public spending and social care, the government will need to set out more detail on how it can meet these near-term challenges to improve NHS performance, while also delivering on its longer-term goals to move care into the community, focus on prevention, and shore up a social care system that is in need of desperate reform. #healthcare #NHS #digitaltransformation #healthmatters Mohi Khan

My LinkedIn feed is unsurprisingly filling up with posts about Lord Darzi's Independent Investigation of the NHS in England. Its diagnosis of our NHS is stark, describing it as being in "critical condition." The challenges are significant: lowest public satisfaction in history, ever increasing waiting times, poor outcomes, an overstretched workforce, and rising health inequalities. It’s clear that the system is under immense strain, and public trust must be restored. Crucially though, despite this I feel the report gives huge grounds for optimism. At its core, the NHS remains vital to our society, and there are key opportunities we can and must seize to transform the service for the future: 1. Build on the organisational strengths: The shift from competition to collaboration between providers provides a stable structure to focus on delivering care. More must be done, but with better integration across systems, resources can be more effectively deployed, driving improved outcomes. 2. Harness technology effectively: Investments in AI, patient portals, and data integration can significantly boost productivity and streamline patient care, transforming the way healthcare is delivered. 3. Expand clinical trials: The NHS can reclaim leadership in medical research, fostering innovation that could revolutionise treatments. 4. Shift to the community: Focusing on preventative care and delivering services through community health can ease hospital pressures and improve long-term population health. The time to act is now. We must embrace these opportunities to create a smarter, more responsive NHS that not only meets the needs of today but is fit for the future. #NHS #HealthcareInnovation #DarziReport #DigitalTransformation https://lnkd.in/eAUFySBY

Change is hard, and integrating health & care is a journey! With the ever-increasing burden of long-term chronic disease, properly integrated health & care based on local needs + evidence-based best practice is the only real hope of sustainable #healthcare provision for payors and providers, and improved outcomes and experience for our patients. This new report by the Reform Research Trust public policy think tank includes this roadmap illustrating the journey the NHS has taken to delivering more integrated health and care over the past 12 yrs. But there are important global lessons in this too for other international health systems looking to better integrated health and care - many of the lessons learned will be useful, and many of the same principles apply. Being seconded to NHS England for part of this journey to run the #NHS Integrated Care Accelerator gave me some valuable insights into how hard it is to change direction for “the world’s largest quango” (and how not to do it too, but I’ll save that for another time!) Having worked on the clinical front-line, and having seen what good integrated health and care looks like in leading #HealthSystems globally, I’m a huge advocate for this necessary direction of change. While their report highlights the burden of bureaucracy and supporting legislation, which does take time, I’d argue that empowering front-line teams and care givers to design and deliver bottom-up change is where the magic really happens. While having the appropriate funding models, governance and guidelines are ultimately necessary, local teams know the local needs and importantly also know the barriers to overcome in delivering more integrated care to meet these. But a top-down focus on those ‘macro’ elements is never going to fully engage and harness local teams to ensure they are bought-in to own this and make change happen. Often what they really need is the support and bandwidth to come together and deliver that change, which is where our experienced teams have been able to offer innovative support, accelerating the process and helping with the programme management and heavy-lift. The report makes an interesting case outlining a new structure for the English health and care system, with two main recommendations: 1) Phasing out NHS England, with some re-centralising of functions to the Dept Health & Social Care 2) Devolving the majority of NHS services to local Government regionally, who then decide their local service models based on local needs I have some thoughts, but I’ll follow that discussion with interest to see how it progresses! You can read their paper free online at their website here: https://lnkd.in/eMjwXrSB Do you agree - what do you think needs to change? #Health #IntegratedCare #KPMG #KPMGhealth

The NHS is still alive, but we should all be concerned... Here's hoping that we're not just getting a diagnosis, but a prognosis. We'd all like to know the direction of travel and when the NHS will be in better health. Lord Darzi's report, released today, has made it clear that for Patients, access to services has been more challenging and got worse over the past 10-15 years. Trouble with accessing basically every service the NHS should be offering and improving. It's also shown that the 2012 Act has caused an endless reconfiguration of the NHS, which has distracted management from focussing on productivity and delivery of core services. For the workforce, who genuinely care about their patients, they've just seen everything around them crumble due to lack of capital investment, waiting lists grow due to massive shifts in workforce, so the growth in hospital based staff has just about coped with the additional demands of increase complexity, increased long term health challenges and significant increases in the number of children and young people needed acute care. There's been significant growth of regulators (many many more per hospital than there used to be), but reductions in community healthcare staffing which is the only enabler of flow out of hospitals which makes the capacity to care for the most acutely unwell possible. What does all this mean? Well - the report is light on policy recommendations because it was explicitly restricted from making them - but hopefully it means that the government will acknowledge what has been talked about for a very long time by everyone in health and care services, which is significant investment in care at home, out of the hospital and sorting out the desperate shortage of capital investment in both technology and buildings. #nhs #dhsc #lorddarzi #nhsengland #workforce #health #socialcare #primarycare https://lnkd.in/eDrp9Q9v

Have you explored our manifesto yet? As the UK prepares for a general election, we present a manifesto that examines how well the NHS is meeting its users’ priorities and describes a set of high impact policies to create a more person centred health service. We recommend that policymakers set out a commitment and strategy to restore confidence in public health and care services. This should involve reducing waiting times, improving people's experiences of care, and listening to patients and the public before introducing important changes. To read how our expertise in measuring, understanding, and improving people’s experience of care could help to restore public confidence in the NHS, click on the link below: https://lnkd.in/eq3eskBM #NHS #PersonCentredCare #PersonCentredHealthService #PickerManifesto #PickerPrinciples #HealthcareManifesto 

The long awaited report about the state of the NHS by Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham OM KBE PC FRS was published this morning. full report here https://lnkd.in/eZz7PPdx Great to see that several pieces of analysis my colleagues at Edge Health UK have undertaken for and with amongst others NHS England, Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT), the Children's Hospital Alliance and Beamtree have directly been quoted in the report outlining some of the difficulty the NHS is in (especially when it comes to children's health) but also some of the opportunity (especially where it comes to digital and data). The key take-aways are what we already know - the NHS is not coping. Focus has to be on digitising the health service, focussing spend toward community care, and focussing on prevention. The good news is that I think the political will and evidence are aligning (the report has 300 pages of charts in the Annex!) - lets hope it is enough!