24.01.13
Patient care at risk from bureaucracy – NHS Confederation
Bureaucratic “burdens” could risk distracting frontline NHS staff from patient care, the NHS Confederation has warned.
A review of progress in reducing this bureaucracy found that the number of requests for the NHS to provide information has not decreased in line with fewer administration staff and managers.
This could lead to frontline NHS staff having to divert their time away from patients to form filling and information gathering. The NHS Confederation has called for the Department of Health and Arms Length Bodies (ALBs) to help organisations focus on reducing this.
There has been “insufficient progress” in this area, the NHS Confederation said, due to a lack of cooperation between various agencies that require information. Providers currently lack the right to formally challenge agencies which ask for the same or similar information requested by others.
The development of a potential new inspection regime being considered by health secretary Jeremy Hunt must take account of these objectives, and only include new information collections if they add real value, the new paper recommends.
Mike Farrar, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “NHS organisations have a responsibility to provide the right information so they are accountable to patients and taxpayers. But we need to strike the right balance of providing information which allows patients to have a clear picture of the standards of care, without spending a disproportionate amount of time providing the same information to numerous organisations in different ways.
“We are concerned that patient care could be affected because organisations and staff are distracted by the burdens of administrative requests from external organisations.
“Our members have told us that this is a growing problem for them. We will be working with them in the coming months to help them address this issue and feed back their concerns and proposals to the Government and other relevant bodies.”
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