NHS Confederation: ‘ring-fence NHS funding’
pharmafile | June 5, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Mid Staffs, NHS Confederation, Rob webster, UK
The boss of the NHS Confederation has challenged political parties to ring-fence NHS funding for the next ten years.
Rob Webster also wants £2 billion per year to be invested in developing new sustainable models of integrated care, while he also said there needs to be a ‘rebalancing’ of the way physical and mental health are viewed.
In his first speech since becoming chief executive in February, he justified the call for cash by saying: “You can’t change without incurring cost.”
The NHS Confederation, which represents all organisations that commission and provide NHS services, is holding its annual conference in Liverpool this week.
Webster told his audience at the conference that the NHS currently constituted a ‘burning platform’ of overstretched services, long waits and financial failure.
NHS reform has been driven by a desire to ‘avoid disaster situations’, he added, but “this fear-driven approach does not motivate improvement”: instead, he said this was a ‘watershed year’ in which essential change could be delivered in the health service.
Webster said the NHS Confederation wants:
- ‘genuine parity of esteem’ between mental and physical health, including extending the same rights on access and choice to mental health service users as those which apply to physical health care and treatment
- faster reform of the NHS payment system “to support better direction of funding to where it is needed”
- ‘unblocking’ the foundation trust pipeline, and focussing on the creation of sustainable health and social care systems, rather than on one governance model
- improved sharing of information
- genuine co-commissioning, rather than ‘obsessing over contract management’.
But it was not just policy-makers to whom Webster threw down the gauntlet – he also said health service leaders had to improve how they engage with their own staff, ensuring they put into practice the Berwick report’s recommendations on improving skills at every staff level.
Professor Don Berwick said patient safety should be prioritised above all else and that the NHS must “engage, empower, and hear patients and carers at all times”.
His focus is on treating staff well, nurturing and developing them ‘wholeheartedly’, with transparency to the fore everywhere “in the service of accountability, trust, and the growth of knowledge”.
In Berwick’s opinion, NHS staff are not to blame for scandals such as Mid Staffs.
“In the vast majority of cases it is the systems, procedures, conditions, environment and constraints they face that lead to patient safety problems,” he insisted.
Adam Hill
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