In my first month as the Assembly Member for South Wales East I have been getting to grips with my other new post, as Liberal Democrat Shadow Minister for Health and Wellbeing.
I want to do everything I possibly can to make sure the NHS in Wales remains a great service; a service, free at the point of demand that puts patients first and provides quality healthcare when it’s needed.
The NHS in Wales impacts on each one of us at some point in our lives. There is no argument over the need to deliver a cost effective, safe, patient-centred service in an efficient and timely manner. The question is how?
The present economic climate gives us an opportunity to think smarter and look at systems as a whole. We know, from a recent Assembly Government report, that NHS organisations in Wales “enter this more challenging period from a less financially secure platform” than England. And yet NHS Finance directors have already indicated that about a fifth of the NHS budget or £1 billion is spent ineffectively here in Wales. So there is no time to lose.
People’s expectations are rising and there is a growing demand for healthcare, but this cannot be solved by increasing capacity. In commerce and industry, a greater understanding of demand and capacity has led to increased productivity. By focussing on what customers want and looking at the service as a whole, the quality of the service can be significantly improved.
There is much talk of changing the way the health service works but is it happening quickly enough?
Take the ambulance service. New systems are in place which use past data to predict where the likelihood of the next call will come from, so staff can be deployed to appropriate locations, leading to improvements in performance.
However, the ambulance service relies on an efficient handover of their patients when they reach the hospital. On a regular basis over 100 ambulance hours can be ‘lost’ in one region as ambulance crews remain stacked up outside hospitals or in corridors with their patients on trolleys. In fact in Wales as a whole around 120 ‘lost’ hours a day is not uncommon.
This not only has a detrimental effect on the patient waiting on the trolley and the patient waiting for that ambulance, but on the resources available throughout the NHS.
Unless a person has first hand experience of this situation they find it difficult to fully appreciate what happens. Many people are under the illusion that after an ambulance crew has made the patient safe and transported them to hospital that they are then ready for the next patient. Is this an unrealistic expectation then? After all, when do you ever see patients being treated in the corridor or ambulances queuing up outside the Emergency Department on well known TV hospital dramas?
There are many reasons for these delays ranging from a shortage of beds due to delayed transfers of care to lack of capacity in Emergency departments. The Minister has admitted that the Local Health Boards need to address these delays. What is clear is that none of these issues can be looked at in isolation. The operation of the ambulance service impacts on A & E departments and vice versa.
This is just one example of where the system in place works against the best interest of the patient. Making efficiencies is not just about doing the same for less, but examining and re-examining what is done and if necessary changing the way we operate.
The NHS needs to be approached in an efficient and creative way. Even in these challenging times there is still room for a fresh and innovative approach. After all, a healthy NHS that works for the patients is something that we all deserve.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health-news/2010/08/02/a-healthy-nhs-that-works-for-the-patients-is-something-we-all-deserve-91466-26976852/
