Today the Department for Health and Social Care has published Our Plan for Patients.
Our Plan for Patients prioritises ambulances, backlogs, care and doctors and dentists. It sets out a range of measures to help the NHS and social care perform at their best for patients. The plan will inform patients and empower them to live healthier lives; place an intensive focus on primary care, the gateway to the NHS for most people; use prevention to strengthen resilience and the health of the nation; and improve performance and productivity.
First, on ambulances, to reduce waiting times, we are taking the following steps:
- working with NHS111 and ambulance services so that patients are directed to the full range of services, for example having access to dedicated 24/7 helplines for patients experiencing a mental health crisis
- expanding the use of remote monitoring of patients at home, where it is safe to do so, so that fewer people need to be admitted to hospital and instead receive care in their home
- answering patient calls more quickly by recruiting more 111 and 999 call handlers
- creating more capacity in hospitals-this winter, the NHS will open up the equivalent of 7,000 beds
To reduce the backlog of patients waiting for treatment, we are:
- expanding capacity by changing elements of the NHS pension scheme to help retain doctors, nurses and other senior NHS staff:
- correcting pension rules regarding inflation
- encouraging NHS trusts to explore local solutions for senior clinicians affected by pension tax charges, such as pension recycling
- implementing permanent retirement flexibilities and extending existing temporary measures to allow our most experienced staff to return to service or stay in service longer
- continuing to prioritise patients with the greatest need
- enabling patients to make informed choices about their care by providing as much information as possible about their length of wait for treatment, making waiting lists by speciality and by provider, more accessible
To help people get out of hospitals and into social care support, we are launching a £500 million Adult Social Care Discharge Fund. This first step will inform our further action from next year to rebalance funding across health and care, to establish a strong and sustainable social care sector with greater accountability for use of taxpayers’ money.
Finally, on doctors and dentists, we are:
- changing funding rules to recruit extra support staff, freeing up over one million appointments per year
- publishing appointment data at practice level for the first time ever – helping patients to better understand the care they will receive
- helping pharmacies to manage and supply more medicines, freeing up to two million GP appointments per year
- accelerating the roll-out of new cloud-based telephone systems, making it easier for patients to get through to their local GP practice
- amending the law to allow the General Dental Council to simplify registration for dentists not trained in England, so that they can start practising in the NHS more quickly
- changing the dental contract to incentivise dentists to do more NHS work
Our Plan for Patients can be found in full here: Our plan for patients - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
