Disease prevention is vital to a sustainable NHS – Dr Harpreet Sood
The Senior Fellow to the Chair and Chief Executive’s Office of NHS England gives an update on the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP) Provider Information Day and explains why it is so important to future health care:
The NHS Five Year Forward View has suggested different approaches are needed to ensure the future sustainability of the NHS.
It acknowledges that increasing demand for healthcare, increasing cost, and increasing public expectations must be accommodated within a financially challenged environment.
One such approach is a greater focus on disease prevention, with a commitment to implementing at scale a Type 2 diabetes prevention programme (DPP). With our seven demonstrator sites selected and a prior information notice (PIN) published, the procurement process is now underway.
The rationale for a national procurement is to ensure there is widespread access to lifestyle interventions, facilitating a rapid rollout and scale up and enabling us to access innovative models currently being offered.
As part of the procurement, we held the NDPP provider information day. This was an opportunity for registered organisations to learn more about what we want to achieve with the programme, our ambitions for 2015/16 and the plans for a national rollout from April 2016.
Additionally, it was a chance for us to learn about what is currently being offered both nationally and internationally, what is realistic to achieve and what is not, and how we can develop an accurate service specification for tender.
More than 50 organisations registered and attended and the energy in the room signified the excitement with the programme and the potential benefits it offers not only in diabetes prevention but also across the broader prevention agenda.
Providers were enthused with the co-production approach in designing the programme and service specification by involving them early in the process. This has been done to help us think through what is attainable and what is not so that we can develop a robust and comprehensive service specification that goes out to tender that is part of an open and transparent process.
The work on the NDPP continues and if you are an organisation that offers the DPP or certain components of it then do get in touch by emailing diabetesprevention@phe.gov.uk. Slides and a high level summary of the day are available at www.england.nhs.uk/ndpp.National Diabetes Prevention Programme.
Harpreet Sood
Dr Harpreet Sood is currently a Clinical Advisor for the COVID-19 Vaccine programme, a GP and a board member at Health Education England. Previously he was Associate Chief Clinical Information Officer and Senior Fellow to the CEO of NHS England.
In his previous roles Harpreet led on the NHS Digital Academy and worked on the Global Digital Exemplar programme.
Harpreet trained as a clinical doctor at King’s College London and Imperial College Business School and practiced as a doctor in East London.
Following this he did a masters degree in public health (MPH) at Harvard University where he focused on international health policy and co-founded a digital health start-up.
Post MPH, Harpreet was a Deland Fellow in health policy and management at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a large academic medical centre in Boston.