The NHS Future Forum is looking at the issue of information – Chair Steve Field outlines some of the points that they are hearing.
I attended a recent summit held by the Royal College of GPs in partnership with the Health Foundation and the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges at BMA House. There was a lively debate about how to commission for improved patient care, led by Professor Martin Marshall, and this raised useful issues about the need for cultural change in the NHS.
I offered some ideas on how the NHS should take this forward, which spanned from a focus on integrating care around the individual patient to using the power of commissioning to improve collaboration between clinicians in the whole system.
In any discussion of quality improvement the focus soon moves on to the Future Forum’s work on information. We’ve studied some interesting models of clinical dashboards, notably in the work of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and in some areas of North West England. There are also good examples in Sweden where dashboards contain all the visible data collected from patient care but also account for measures of quality and patient experience. This is real data, in real time, owned by the clinicians.
I’m picking up a lot of support for NICE and the role it can play in the improvement of national standards as well as support for the principle of decommissioning things that don’t work according to NICE guidelines.
The universal use, or not, of the NHS number has been raised in our engagement and listening. I have heard questions as to why the NHS number is not being used by everyone and why not across the whole NHS and social care system.
Patients also want to have more information about the service they currently use or will use in the future. What I’ve been hearing is that patients want to be fully involved in decisions about their care including their options for medicines and treatments. They want to know how effective an intervention will be, what side effects it may have or what will happen if they do nothing.