07.10.14
FTN and NHS Alliance form integrated care collaboration
The Foundation Trust Network (FTN) and NHS Alliance have formed a partnership bringing together senior leaders from primary and secondary care, aimed at breaking down the silos and tensions that have hindered innovation.
The first collaborative working session in July was attended by member s of the general practice, acute, community and mental health settings, and highlighted good practice from around the country where organisations and clinicians are bridging the gap between primary and secondary care.
FTN and NHS Alliance will publish an initial short series of papers to capture the findings of its first six months’ collaborative working, with the first paper due in mid-November.
Rick Stern, chief executive, NHS Alliance said: “A strategic partnership between NHS Alliance and the FTN is an attempt to look anew at the things that have kept us apart and offer some fresh perspectives on the potential for working together and deliver better patient care across our communities.
“Primary care and secondary care have seen each other as competitors for a diminishing NHS budget, protecting vested professional and organisational interests, rather than working towards common goals for patients. We want to challenge this thinking.”
Our next steps will explore what “optimally integrated” health community might look like in 10-20 years’ time, what shared outcomes measures might be and how the system and regulatory frameworks could facilitate collaboration, and how localities could take steps towards an integrated health community in the more immediate future.
Chris Hopson, chief executive at FTN, said: “We know that the scale of the transformation required means that it won’t be easy, but it is absolutely crucial that align national frameworks behind integration and allow localities to work together in the best interests of their patients to deliver more co-ordinated care.
“The FTN and NHS Alliance represent NHS providers of primary and secondary healthcare respectively. We believe we share key common values that can help progress the integration and co-ordination of care in the patient’s interest.”
The common values include patients playing a central role in managing their own conditions and taking decisions about their care, as well as in contributing to shaping the local health care reform to ensure that services cater for their requirements and are enabled to do so.
Additionally, it has been suggested that local health economies need to be given independence and autonomy to address local solutions without being constrained unduly by national frameworks and regulation. This may mean delivering more care in the community in some localities, and forging closer links between primary and secondary care, the partners added.
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