High quality care for all : NHS Next Stage Review final report / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Health by Command of Her Majesty, June 2008.

  • Great Britain. Department of Health
Date:
2008
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: High quality care for all : NHS Next Stage Review final report / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Health by Command of Her Majesty, June 2008. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    overall health and well-being.® It highlighted the rapidly rising risks to long-term health if people are not supported sufficiently early to address issues that stop them from working, with back problems and mental ill health among the most significant. From next year, we will introduce integrated Fit for Work services in primary and community care, bringing together access to musculoskeletal services and psychological therapies for example. This will help people get the support they need to return to appropriate work faster. Empowering patients: more rights and control over health and care 24. Over the last decade, the NHS has gradually given patients more control over their own care. People referred for secondary or hospital- based care can now choose freely where they receive their treatment. And increasingly, there is better information available for patients about outcomes of care such as the information at GP-practice level from the Quality and Outcomes Framework. 25. Patients empowered in this way are more likely to take greater responsibility for their own health, and to dedicate their own time, effort and energy to solving their health problems. This partnership is especially important for those with long-term conditions and their 65 Dame Carol Black, Working for a Healthier Tomorrow, Crown Copyright, March 2008. 3: High quality care for patients and the public carers. We must therefore continue to empower patients with greater choice, better information, and more control and influence. referred for secondary care have free choice of any hospital or treatment centre — NHS or independent sector — that can provide NHS quality care at the NHS price. Choice gives patients the power they need in the system, as NHS resources follows patients in the choices they make. Where patients find it difficult to express preferences, it is the role of staff to take steps to ensure that patients can benefit from greater choice. Choice in public services is sometimes presented as the pre-occupation of the wealthy and the educated, yet the evidence shows that it is the poorest and least well educated who most desire greater choice.®° We believe that choice should become a defining feature of the service. A health service without freedom of choice is not personalised. So the right to choice will now be part of the NHS Constitution, ensuring that people become more clearly aware of it. 67% of semi-routine and routine workers want more choice compared to 59% of managerial and professional workers, and 69% of people with no formal educational qualifications want more choice compared to 55% of those with higher educational qualifications. Appleby & Alvarez, British Social Attitudes Survey 22nd Report, Public Responses to NHS Reform, 2005.
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