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Personalised care plans will give patients control of their own health

Since the publication of this blog Tim Kelsey has left NHS England.

Tim Kelsey, NHS England’s National Director for Patients and Information, speaks out on the launch of Participation Guidance for commissioners.

THE most important goal of a modern health service is to achieve authentic patient participation: this is the central conclusion of the recent report into improving safety that the Prime Minister commissioned from Don Berwick, one of the wisest voices in global healthcare. The NHS should be ‘engaging, empowering and hearing patients and their carers throughout the whole system all the time’.

We shouldn’t need Mr Berwick, an American paediatrician and a leading Obama adviser, to remind us:  the lessons of the Francis Inquiry into Stafford hospital and of every tragedy in the recent history of the NHS are that the absence of patient participation is the root cause of poor care.

Engaging, empowering, hearing, listening, responding: these are strategies that we have seen other industries such as banking, travel and retail use to sustain and improve the services they provide. And while we cannot compare those enterprises with healthcare, there is no doubt that we can follow their lead in transforming ways in which we listen and involve our patients, their carers and the public. In a time of unprecedented financial constraint, the NHS has to turn to its customers and their communities to become active partners in planning and managing their own care.

In July, every hospital trust in England published the first results of the Friends and Family Test (FFT), which provided unprecedented transparency into the quality of customer satisfaction with local A&E and inpatient services. The comments patients and carers now provide every day are an invaluable tool for the rapid and effective improvement of services on the ward.

Today we make another step towards an engaged, empowering health and care service with the launch of our Participation Guidance: “Transforming Participation in Health and Care” sets out a series of programmes designed to help the NHS meet the Berwick standard.

Key among these is that commissioners must now ensure that every person with a long-term illness or disability has a personalised care plan suited to their needs – to empower them to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to take control of their own care. Patients will be able to access these online or on their mobile phone, if they want to and feedback direct to their clinician. Berwick notes the importance of patients and professionals ‘co-producing’ care: personalised care planning is key to that dynamic conversation.

Not everybody has easy access to the internet so we are launching a programme that will support 100,000 of the most disadvantaged in our society to learn how to access health information online, in partnership with the Tinder Foundation. This is one of the most significant initiatives to target inequality ever launched in the NHS.

In a different way, the new Guidance also invites patients to participate in directly improving the quality of clinical outcomes by recording them on a day by day basis – NHS England is to launch 20 initiatives in specialised services where patients will measure their outcomes and share them with their clinician and with other patients, if they choose to. The development of patient centred outcome measurement, such as those developed by organisations like Patients like Me in the US, is transformational: it puts the patient in control, improves outcomes and the effectiveness of service design.

Berwick gives priority not just to individual empowerment but also to collective engagement: how can citizens be meaningfully engaged in the design of local services? How can they properly hold commissioners to account? Among initiatives brought forward in the guidance is a commitment from NHS England to set up a new Citizens Assembly to create a national network that can hold it to account for services it provides – as well as help design them. And all commissioners will now be supported to publish how they have put patient and public participation at the heart of their decision making.

I have known Don Berwick for more than a decade: he has demonstrated over and over again in his writing and his activism that patient empowerment is synonymous with high quality care. In his report, he concludes: ‘The goal is not for patients to be the passive recipients of increased engagement, but rather to achieve a pervasive culture that welcomes authentic patient participation.’ That must be our objective for care in England.

Tim Kelsey was previously National Director for Patients and Information, since the publication of these blogs he has left NHS England.

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3 comments

  1. Pearl Baker says:

    Care Plans for the long term mentally ill are very few and far between. Patients in supported accommodation are poorly supported, shortage of support staff is the norm. This client group are neglected. Many remain in bed, or in their rooms alone. GPs are their Primary Carers, but still think that te non existent Psychiatrist is!

    I have just competed a study of the present system including the COP, DWP,OPG, Office of Judicial Complaint, CCG, and the GPs, and how we are still not offering transparency in all of the above, failure to implement the findings of How can we regulate Proffessionals is not helping.

    I have worked in legal, appeals to Commisioners in the DWP and not lost one case.

    If any person reading this comment are interested in these reports, please reply.

    All reports are being sent to various MPs interested in Mental Health.

    What is happening to the Mentally Ill in the community is far greater than what happened in the high profile case for those with a learning disability.

  2. cpipe says:

    Will funds be made available to local authorities to support the provision of adequate internet access (and help of expert help in using it) in public libraries?

  3. Dr Anita Goraya, GP says:

    A welcome wide-ranging array of initiatives to bring the patient voice into the Commissioning process – the name of the game is active citizenship.

    I applaud the recognition that the Inverse Care Law applies to the use of online resources and the Tinder Foundation will seek to begin addressing this.

    Use of online communities for LTCs, such as PatientsLikeMe, have huge potential for effective self-management support too.