Harder than the pandemic: Key priorities for a new era in healthcare
Andrew is Co-Founder of Aiming for Health Success, a new health research and advisory body focusing on productivity and public-private partnership. Previously he was director of the leading Westminster public services think tank, Reform, for 14 years.
The post-pandemic healthcare era requires a new vision where improvement and care are key. As a result, Sodexo Health & Care and Aiming for Health Success have launched a series of roundtables for Trust and ICS chief executives to support their strategic thinking. In this article, Andrew Haldenby shares his thoughts on the latest roundtable held in Manchester in December 2022.
Speaking in October 2022, Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of NHS England, said the recovery from the Covid pandemic is an even harder challenge than the pandemic itself. As she said: “It’s where we are now. It’s the months and years ahead that will bring the most complex challenges.”
Health Ministers understand and have moved to help. In November, the Health Secretary Steve Barclay said that the NHS situation was “extremely difficult”. The Autumn Statement introduced new funding, in particular an additional £500 million adult social care discharge fund. It also announced a review of central targets and regulation so that health leaders can innovate and improve services much more easily.
From “gridlock” to integrated care
Above all the government wants the NHS and industry to develop integrated care i.e., including all of the out-of-hospital services that prevent unnecessary admissions and stays. Without such care services, the Care Quality Commission has warned of “gridlock”. Aiming for Health Success has described the development of out-of-hospital services as the NHS’s “new core business”.
Ministers would be pleased to know that health and care leaders attending the Aiming for Health Success & Sodexo roundtable in Manchester discussed how they’re already working towards delivering this new agenda.
Philip Leigh, Chief Executive of Sodexo Health & Care UK&I, described a particularly exciting pilot programme in which his team identifies patients at particular risk of emergency readmission. The team then provides monitoring and support in the patient’s home, designed to improve their health outcomes and prevent unplanned and unnecessary demand on hospital beds.
A mental health trust leader described her success in providing greater support for high-need patients in the community. An integrated care system chief executive spoke about how his teams are building social capital and resilience in local communities to ease the pressure not only on hospitals but also on primary care. Several Trusts work with primary care to provide faster and more accurate diagnoses.
Unsurprisingly, attendees discussed potential solutions to the challenge of social care and discharge. There is a great opportunity for integrated care system leaders to make a difference since they combine both health and local government. One Trust chief executive asked industry to start what amounts to a new domiciliary care service, able to receive patients quickly and at scale. In the same way Sodexo are piloting a service to reduce acute re-admissions, it was agreed that there was an opportunity here for such at scale private sector organisations to develop such solutions to support flow – it was accepted that the model however would need to be different from the traditional.
Meeting the waiting time challenge
Maintaining the efficiency of the hospital estate will also be critical. Philip Leigh explained how his teams have developed new inflection control and deep cleaning services to reduce the risk of infections delaying treatment. Sodexo Health & Care is also offering personalised nutrition to patients with the aim of accelerating their recovery. Industry and hospitals together are remodelling estates to improve patient flow and so achieve higher rates of activity.
The pressure on the NHS is intense. But as the roundtable showed, health and care leaders are already changing services for the better. The challenge for 2023 will be to accelerate progress. Because of industry’s ability to work at scale and draw on different sources of capital, new partnership working will be key. The launch of a new government / health industry elective recovery taskforce is a good sign.
As Steve Barclay recently concluded: “COVID is still with us. And so in particular are its consequences, in the form of pandemic backlogs. So we must continue to embrace the pace and risk appetite of the pandemic when it comes to innovating at pace and at scale. That is what I believe the British people rightly expect us to do, and if we are to confront the scale of challenges facing the NHS, that is what we need to do."
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