Next steps for the 10-year plan: thoughts following The King’s Fund Conference
Ways to Wellness CEO Sandra Mitchell-Phillips recently attended The King’s Fund Conference on the government’s 10-year plan for healthcare in England. Here are her thoughts on the event, which featured keynotes from both Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and North West Mayor Andy Burnham.
There’s a great deal of talk about neighbourhood health since the plan was published in early July, and the first tangible steps towards its implementation are taking place in this area, but one area of consensus on this at this event was the fact that care must be taken around what ‘neighbourhood health’ actually means in practice, as simply changing the location of care into neighboorhoods will have no impact upon the quality of care individuals receive.
It is therefore crucial that delivery itself is the change-maker, especially given the impact long-term conditions have on the NHS, including on costs, as eloquently explained by Paul Corrigan CBE, who among his roles has been an adviser to our Board of Trustees, and is now Strategy Advisor for the implementation of the plan.
Key to this shift is how we cultivate partnerships, which is an ongoing challenge in the face of inevitable and necessary efficiency cuts. What is key is that as a joined up healthcare infrastructure, made up of both the NHS and the VCSE, relationships must be built and maintained at an organisational, rather than an individual level.
For richer for poorer
Another key change in the plan is the shift from treating illness to prevention, and delegates shared the view that data will play a huge part in how this will be acheived, both to understand current hospital admission levels, and to prevent future inappropriate admissions.
But more than one speaker alluded to the fact that while health data is amassed at scale at the current time, a key area for improvement towards prevention is ensuring rich insight is continually gleaned from this information. There is little point in being data rich if we are insight poor!
This speaks to our own way of working at Ways to Wellness, where the design of all our prototypes is evidence-led, to ensure data is not just gathered, but captured in order to be built upon, so decisions impacting the delivery of care, and people’s experience of that care, are as informed as they can be.
Social prescribing 2.0?
North West Metro Mayor Andy Burnham not only emphasised the importance of the VCSE sector in achieving the three shifts laid out in the 10-year plan, but spoke of the transformational power that can be harnessed through social prescribing, particularly when applied using a neighbourhood model.
He spoke of the housing challenges that are, in many cases, such compounding factors when people are managing long-term health conditions, and that is certainly something we can attest to from the evidence we’ve gathered in our varied projects, not least our foundational Long-term Conditions prototype.
He said: “What we need is social prescribing taken to a whole new level, but with housing first. Support needs to be delivered through the VCSE sector, who are the neighbours of those needing the support.”
We couldn’t agree more that this approach is vital to creating the ‘Live Well’ approach that is central to the government’s plans.
Now much of this sounds straightforward, but within a system in which recent investment has desired an understandable level of guarantee, there are processes to unpick if it is to be achieved. And as with any major operational shift, a risk appetite is required. However, the feeling in the room was one of communal willingness to take that leap of faith which can so often lead to fantastic things.
