16649 Commissioning Newspaper-A4_Layout 1 04/08/2015 15:43 Page 3
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LET’S PUT THE MAGIC BACK INTO
GENERAL PRACTICE, SAYS JEREMY HUNT
“We have to find a way to
bring back the magic into
general practice” Health
Secretary Jeremy Hunt told
Health+Care delegates 2015.
But it’s not going to be easy,
he warned. “Too many GPs
feel they are on a hamster
wheel with ten minute
appointments and they are
finding it increasingly difficult
to deliver personalised care.”
The announcement of a new deal for
GPs, the recruitment of an extra 5,000
GPs, and a £1 billion fund to improve
practice premises, was the start of the
Government’s plan to transform the
role of GPs.
The Five Year Forward View aimed to
deliver full integration of health and
social care, a much bigger priority for
mental health, a focus on prevention
rather than cure and the role of public
health, tackling the challenges of
smoking and obesity. “This is a very
exciting moment. The eyes of the
world are on the NHS - no country
anywhere has delivered fully
integrated out-of-hospital care,
focused on prevention rather than
cure, for an entire healthcare
economy,” he said.
focusing on technology, innovating
and changing models of care. “If you
look at any high performing
organisation, whether it's in the public
or private sector, they get the culture
right at the start of their
transformation not at the end,” he
said.
But in taking forward the proposals in
the Five Year Forward View Mr Hunt
cautioned that it was important that
people did not go down the false
alleyway of thinking there was a
choice between financial discipline
and high quality care. Controlling
deficits and living within a budget
should not mean making people
work longer or reducing the quality of
care. “If you look all over the world
there is plenty of evidence that the
path to safer, better care is the same
as the path to lower cost. Too often
money is wasted on the things that
deliver substandard care, said Mr
Hunt.
It was also important that the NHS
adopted a system of “intelligent
transparency”. The driver for
improving quality was learning and
peer review. “I want intelligent
transparency to replace targets and
top-down initiatives as the way to
improve services. We can do that by
learning from data that is published
and make this the engine for
improvement.”
The second blind alley that the NHS
should not go down was to forget
about getting the culture right whil