Patients Association calls for redesign of Patient - NHS relationship
Patients Association's Press Release
Patients Association calls for redesign of Patient - NHS relationship
For immediate release
19/07/2010
When the White Paper contents were made public we welcomed the benefits offered to patients and clinicians. We also said it was a huge experiment without much hard evidence about how it would work.
Today’s details of just how all this will work puts a very great duty on the Secretary of State to match his rhetoric with the reality - for all patients. The NHS Commissioning Board, and the other regulators on whom patients rely for safe, effective, efficient care, must hold the Service to account in such a way that their standards can be accessed by every patient. We need no more of the “lump of the month” approach to some conditions at the expense of others. Patients have an essential role in bringing the NHS up to the standards of the best around the world.
The Secretary of State’s vision for patients of “no decision about me without me” is spot on. But even before the NHS Commissioning Board and others start setting the standards and holding GPs and others to account for their standards of care and their spending of public money, there has to be a fundamental redesign of the relationship of patients to the NHS. To make “no decision about me without me” come true for patients, three things are required:
- Patients must no longer be supplicants in GP surgeries or in hospitals. At present there are problems of access, continuity and redress which are unacceptable and perpetuate this situation
- Patient experiences, surveys and the like must be genuine and robust, not carried out in settings and at times which do not give the whole story
- Patients’ views must be independently determined. How will the regulators decide what constitutes “patient experience”? The first step to making patients have a real input into their NHS is to design a complaints system where patients have real influence over poor, undignified or unsafe care, so that it really does “never happen to anyone else”.
Only if these are put right will the Secretary of State’s vision become a reality.
For more information please contact the Patients Association on 0208 423 9111.
