05.01.12
Health and social care to be merged
Health and social care systems are set be merged, Prime Minister David Cameron has stated, following recommendations from the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust.
This is likely to lead to a speeding up of the reconfiguration of care from hospitals into the community – leading to hospital and hospital unit closures.
The health think tanks produced a new report that recommends that the different systems should become integrated to ensure the NHS is sustainable as treating long-term health conditions becomes a bigger a bigger task. This includes staff working together more closely to streamline care and new guarantees for patients to receive an agreed care plan.
The report states that integration should be “a clear, ambitious and measurable goal to improve the experience of patients and service users, and to be delivered by a defined date”.
It adds: “This goal would serve a similar purpose to the aim of delivering a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks for patients receiving hospital care.”
The NHS Confederation’s deputy policy director, Jo Webber, told the Guardian that the move could lead to hospital closures, in order to provide better overall care.
She said: “Integrating care will improve services, particularly for people who are frail and those with long term conditions. But it will also involve making some really difficult decisions as hospital activity is reduced and moved into the community.
“Integration will take a long time to bed down and start improving the quality of care patients receive. Integration will produce more sustainable models of care in the long term but many local initiatives could mean new services being run in tandem while old ones are shut, which could be more expensive in the short term.”
The care services minister Paul Burstow said: “Integrated care should be the norm. Our ambition for the NHS and social care is a simple one – to achieve better results for people and carers. So our priority is to orientate the whole system around patients, service users and carers through our Outcomes Framework.”
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