What role do acute providers play in neighbourhood health?
Our Policy Fellow Emily Hughes introduces our new report on the role of acute providers in neighbourhood health.
The 10 Year Health Plan puts neighbourhood health at the heart of government ambitions for delivering more patient-centred care, reducing fragmentation, and improving population health outcomes. Recognising the importance of this agenda, neighbourhood health has been one of Shelford’s priority work areas over the last year.
Led by our Directors of Strategy, we have been exploring this subject in collaboration with partners across primary care, community care, and national think tanks. This new report distils the learning gathered over the past year, drawing on insights from external partners, as well as outlining areas that will require further policy thinking and development to make neighbourhood health ambitions a reality.
As a group of hospital providers, we are fully supportive of and committed to the principles set out in the 10 Year Health Plan, to make care more proactive, person-centred, and accessible. To deliver on this vision, we see the central question for acute providers as one of evolution: how can hospitals interact and interface with the rest of the system in a way that blurs traditional care boundaries, making care less fragmented and more focused on the patient? This question pertains to the full range of care pathways; from transforming outpatient care to improve patient experience, through to designing joined-up, proactive approaches to avoid unplanned admissions in urgent and emergency care.
Several key themes appear throughout the report:
- The importance of integrated system working, and the necessity of investing time and energy into building strong relationships – the foundation of effective partnerships;
- Designing care models that connect specialists into community settings, recognising that for a growing number of people with multiple or complex care needs, ‘what good looks like’ stretches across a number of traditional service boundaries;
- Thinking transformatively about what good care looks like, rather than treating neighbourhood health as a simple ‘lift and shift’ approach;
- Exploring the impact of vertical integration, particularly within integrated acute and community providers, examining whether this model can help to shift the dial more effectively in improving population health;
- The need for a ‘double running’ ethos in organisational focus – whereby leaders must simultaneously manage immediate performance pressures while investing time and energy into the relationships and infrastructure required to build a more sustainable health system for the future.
The report highlights a number of case studies across Shelford members, demonstrating how our organisations are working collaboratively to improve outcomes and deliver care closer to home.
While our exploration of neighbourhood health concepts has crystallised where hospitals can best support and drive this work forward, we believe that a number of policy areas require further thought and development at national and local levels – these are detailed within the report, and include: adapting financial flows to support neighbourhood health; embedding neighbourhood health objectives into provider performance measures; the role of Integrated Health Organisations in improving population health outcomes; aligning the research and innovation agenda with neighbourhood health ambitions, and effective workforce planning to increase the number of generalists.
You can read the full report here. If you would like to discuss this work or find out more, please get in touch via info@shelfordgroup.org.