NEWS

Mental Health Strategy

The latest reports on the Treatment of Dementia patients have been pretty damning. Our key clients based across the UK all agree that a Dementia Strategy reform is on the horizon and Mental Health is going to be a big area of focus over the next 18 months for the NHS.

There is a lack of experienced Mental Health specialists who can review the existing service being provided and already we are being asked to examine the current care pathways and implement shorter hospital stays. We will focus on placing more onus on Local Authorities to deliver greater Social Care to these patients, delivered at home.

We uniquely understand the issues associated with this; funding, understaffing, logistical and risk issues, however, delivering a home based approach to Dementia care in particular is at the forefront of the minds of Senior NHS managers involved in this area.

Please contact us today to discuss ways in which we can help.

Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP)

QIPP is the new framework being adopted across the NHS to ensure that the changes required to commission and deliver health services in the new economic context are not just considered as a cost cutting exercise. The 4 key components of QIPP – Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention are the four key areas against which all future changes should be measured.

Byrnes Freeman imbeds this approach in all we do. As a result, we should ensure that whilst the financial imperative may have been the catalyst for the pace and scale of change required, new solutions will only be accepted if they are seen to improve the quality of healthcare offered, introduce innovative approaches, increase productivity and support the key principle: prevention today means less intervention tomorrow.

It is inevitable that such an approach will combine the very highest order of efficiencies in areas that we already know about, where variation (and with it inefficiency) is rife, together with new radical solutions that may challenge some of the key aspects of our current ways of working. If collective working, redesigning incentives and co-existing as a genuine collective health economy are to work, some significant degree of system reform is almost inevitable. Sometimes however, difficult times call for bold moves, and QIPP offers a framework with which by planning change together we will be able to construct a healthy system to augment our individually healthy organisations. If this genuinely leads to a collective ‘win/win’ approach in which local economy gains are genuinely more important than individual but isolated successful organisations, the concept of Social Value – an indirect benefit arising from a change to the commissioning or provision of healthcare – will be achieved.

Strategic planning is required to deliver the pace and scale of change needed to deliver against the QIPP agenda i.e. absorbing the changing and growing healthcare needs of the population whilst anticipating lower levels of resources over 3 years from 2011/12, despite maintaining QIPP principles: - raise Quality, encourage Innovation, improve Productivity and develop Prevention. Please contact us today to discuss how we can help imbed QIPP within your organisation