Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to “reimagine” the NHS but questions remain as to what form it will take when he’s finished with it.
Ministers are keen on suggestions that will “shift the NHS away from late diagnosis and treatment to a model where more services are delivered in local communities and illnesses are prevented in the first place”.
Speaking at the launch of “the biggest national conversation about the future of the NHS since its birth” the Prime Minister and Health Secretary Wes Streeting said they want the public’s ideas of how to keep people well and out of hospitals. The input from patients as well as staff will inform its ten year plan which will bring about three big shifts in healthcare – hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.
Hospital to Community
The Government aims to shift care out of hospitals – where it is most expensive – and into primary care. This will mean more tests and treatments in beefed up GP surgeries, community clinics and pharmacies. Admittedly, this had been an aim of the previous Conservative government but it was undermined by lack of GPs and shrinking funding for pharmacies and NHS dentistry. A collapse in access to family doctors and dentists has in turn led to more people turning up in hospitals once their health had deteriorated.
New neighbourhood health centres will be set up to enable patients to see family doctors, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists, health visitors, or mental health specialists, all under the same roof.
Sickness to Prevention
By moving from sickness to prevention, the Government wants to shorten the amount of time people spend in-ill health and prevent illnesses before they happen. It is looking to use Britain’s world-leadings genomics capability to embed DNA testing which can predict who is likely to get diseases. One example is a trial of an at-home saliva test to identify men in the top 10% risk of developing prostate cancer.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “This is the game changer for health and care in the 21st century – the combination of genomics, AI, machine learning and big data that will enable us not only to diagnose earlier and treat faster, but actually, actually predict and prevent illness. If we get this right, not only will Britain benefit from this groundbreaking science and technology, we will be leading the world in it.”
Currently the biggest reason for children being admitted to hospitals is for emergency tooth extractions caused by tooth decay. As part of plans to tackle this a programme of supervised teeth brushing will be brought in at schools.
Plans could also see medics prevent ill health with initiatives like handing out smart watches and wearable tech to patients with conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure so they can monitor them at home.
The Government is already planning a beefed up Tobacco and Vapes Bill which will phase out tobacco products by gradually raising the minimum age to buy cigarettes. It is considering other options previously deemed too “nanny state” such as sugar taxes.
Analogue to Digital
The Government plans to set up a single patient record, summarising patient health information, test results, and letters in one place, through the NHS App. This is another example of an aspiration for the NHS for some time which has never been realised.
It will put patients in control of their own medical history, meaning they don’t have to repeat it at every appointment, and that staff have the full picture of patients’ health.
New laws are set to be introduced to make NHS patient health records available across all NHS trusts, GP surgeries and ambulance services in England – speeding up patient care, reducing repeat medical tests, and minimising medication errors. Systems will be able to share data more easily, saving NHS staff an estimated 140,000 hours of NHS staffs’ time every year, because staff will have quicker access to patient data, saving time that can then be spent face-to-face with patients who need it most and potentially saving lives. But concerns have been raised about privacy and data protection.
Care minister Stephen Kinnock said: “We’re bringing forward primary legislation, which will give you that cast-iron guarantee that all of the security protocols will be in place. If you constantly just say, we can’t do this because of data protection concerns, you’re just going to have the status quo going on and on and on.”
He described the Government’s plans as “no different to online banking apps” and “definitely more NatWest than it is Star Trek”.
“In the end, if we don’t modernise the NHS, make it more efficient and productive, you can have the best data protection rules in the world, but you’re not going to have a health and care system that actually works,” he said.
A spokesperson for patient privacy campaign group medConfidential said: “Patients should know how data about them is accessed and used, and their choices to opt out of such uses should be respected not removed.”
NHS England’s national medical director Professor Sir Stephen Powis told Times Radio: “Data safety is a top priority for the NHS, for the reasons of privacy, but also for reasons of cybersecurity. But it really is important that we ensure that patients have their own health data and have control of their own health data.
“I’ve said for a long time we need to move away from the old paradigm where it was the hospital or the GP that was the owner of the data – you had to ask permission to see your own health data. We need to move to a world in which you’re the owner of your data. It’s your health, it’s your data, and I think it empowers individuals to know more about their health and to live healthier lives.”
Click HERE to have your say on the future of the NHS.