Innovative Care 'Could Help Millions'

The NHS could help improve the care of over 15 million people living with long-term conditions and reduce the number of unnecessary trips to hospital if the most innovative work being pioneered in other parts of the NHS were adopted nationwide.

In addition to helping patients manage their conditions better and reducing distressing emergency episodes, new approaches to reduce ambulance call-outs by over 900,000 and hospital bed days by over 10.2 million can deliver huge savings – an estimated £2.2 billion to reinvest in frontline patient care, helping to meet the rising demands our NHS faces.

People with long-term conditions are some of the most frequent users of the NHS. In 2009-10, an estimated £70 billion of total health and social care expenditure was spent on patients with long-term conditions. The number of people with a long-term condition is set to rise to around 18 million within 20 years – combine this with the ageing UK population and the NHS faces even greater pressures.

Plans to modernise the way the NHS works will encourage a more integrated approach to patient care and help personalise services to the needs of individual patients. Clinicians from the ambulance service, hospitals and GPs and nurses from Kirklees in West Yorkshire are already leading the way by working together to identify patients who frequently use emergency services in order to help them manage their condition better and avoid unnecessary hospital visits.

Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley said: “We have a vital opportunity now to modernise the NHS. People with long-term conditions have some of the most complex health needs in the country and we need to personalise services to suit their needs, not fit them around how the NHS is organised. We want clinicians to take the lead locally in developing health services so that they can support patients, to take decisions about their care and help them take charge of their health and the care they receive. With this approach, they will find new ways to tackle this problem for both the NHS and patients.”

(BMcN)