The Foundation Trust Network (FTN) has voiced concerns over the lack of dialogue surrounding cost savings within the NHS, telling hospitals that long-term planning will be required in order to successfully achieve service reorganisation.

The FTN has reported that there appears to be no convincing political strategy about NHS commissioners’ investment in service redesign aimed at taking costs out of the secondary sector. They have also stated that health service providers are experiencing uncertainty around where exactly their investments have gone.

It has been reported that Foundation Trusts (FT’s) are currently working towards achieving savings targets of more than 4%. It is also expected that a proportion of these savings will be put towards funding alternative services to help reorganise the way in which NHS care is delivered. These combined savings are hoped to reduce NHS spending by £20 billion over the next three years by dramatically reducing overheads and potentially decommissioning whole services.

The report followed a recent survey of FTN members polling over half of the members who reported experiencing a lack of engagement from commissioners in areas such as preventing hospital re-admissions.

Sue Slipman, Chief Executive of the FTN, asserted that without investment in alternative services, it will not prove possible to judge whether the NHS efficiency gains can be achieved while retaining the quality of services necessary for enhancing the patient experience. She voiced her concerns that providers are being coerced into taking short term measures as opposed to long term solutions, and added that FT’s are not being given the freedom and flexibility they need to acquire the necessary resources. Due to these measures, inefficiencies are bound to remain. Furthermore, she states that the savings challenge is too large for single FT’s to be able to solve alone as it requires a radical re-think about how patients progress through the healthcare system in order for services to be reconfigured to work more efficiently.

The FTN said FT’s would like to be able to plan ahead, and suggested that long-term contracts would give providers more stability and scope for long-term planning. The Department of Health currently issues new contracts each year to reflect new targets.

Slipman continued by stating that cost saving targets requires that demand for treatment be taken out of hospitals with greater provision in community settings. She said that it is widely believed that in order for hospitals to be able to do more with less, care needs to take place within different settings. This will also be of greater benefit to patients, as they will have greater choice in where their treatment takes place.

Furthermore, Slipman added that essential service redesign and reconfiguration remains politically difficult within the NHS which prevents strategic decisions from being made and implemented quickly.

The FTN’s concerns follow similar comments by Mike Farrar, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, who stated that few NHS organisations were successfully transforming their services and releasing money in line with the Department of Health’s Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) programme. Without making essential transformational changes, Farrar stated that he expected financial and service-level problems to emerge quickly and frequently.

In order that Trusts can meet cost savings targets in a timely and suitable manner, clinicians and managers need to be provided with the tools to be able to perform to the best of their ability. Trusts could therefore seek to implement an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system such as Therapy Manager, which provides managers with a robust suite of tools to enable on-demand monitoring of key performance measures. The system can report on the Costs of Care and where they are incurred, ensuring managers are supported in clinical decision making which could potentially reduce the financial costs incurred in patient care.

Original Source The Guardian

About Pathway Software

Pathway Software (www.pathwaysoftware.com) specialises in the design and development of patient information systems for Allied Health professionals.

Its flagship product, Therapy Manager, is an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system specifically designed for Therapy Services to provide decision makers with the ability to track and manage clinical activity and analyse cost of care by patient, episode or service. The system also demonstrably reduces administration time and the costs of managing Therapy Services.