Health Secretary Wes Streeting has promised a focus on holistic health provision in individual neighbourhoods, claiming it would be a pathway to repairing the NHS at the national level. Now, it seems one such scheme in Washwood Heath, a deprived area of Birmingham, offers a potential blueprint for the rest of the country.
'What the NHS should look like' A community clinic set up in the east Birmingham suburb two years ago brings together, under one roof, hospital doctors, GPs, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social care teams, mental health professionals and charity staff.
They target "the most frequent users of health services – and the aim is to keep them well, and out of hospital," said the BBC. In practice, this means offering medical services, such as scans and X-rays, and tackling social issues such as access to housing or "arranging support for daily tasks, such as washing and dressing", alongside medical treatment.
The result? A reduction in waiting times and ambulance delays, and a significant drop in local GP calls and hospital A&E admissions, said the Birmingham Mail.
"We see it as a blueprint for what the NHS could look like, and should look like, in the future," said Lorraine Galligan, chief of nursing for Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust.
Huge challenges "Neighbourhood health is not a new 'thing' at all", said Anna Charles, for The King's Fund, and "this could be one of its greatest strengths". Statistics on community-focused approaches show that improvement "isn't achieved through a single policy solution but, instead, through the aggregation of many simultaneous changes to the way in which care is organised and delivered".
Yet there remain huge financial and political challenges ahead. While research suggests that every £100 spent on community care would save £131 in hospital care, "part of the problem with making the whole system buy into it is money", said the BBC.
Those in charge of managing local NHS funding are currently focused on "making sure it goes where they immediately need it," Ruth Rankine, an NHS Confederation primary care director, told the broadcaster. And it will also take time to get results: "you need to invest in front, and then it can be years before it has an impact".
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