NHS boss strives for more flexibility
New NHS chief executive Simon Stevens has spoken out about his impatience to “accelerate the redesign of care delivery” in a bid to create more local flexibility for services as well as innovate structure and system rules.
Speaking at the NHS Confederation conference, Mr Stevens said he plans to “accelerate the redesign of care delivery. Rather than constantly debating the re-organisation of our management tiers, let’s now ask the more profound questions about how care is actually being delivered.”
Improving the NHS
His new ideas also involves schemes to bring primary, secondary and community services closer together, “taking a very hard mosed review of what we’re actually getting for the money and whether we can do better.”
An advocate of smaller, community hospitals over centralised services, Mr Stevens has also revealed that he wants “far greater local flexibility to better match the health and social care needs of the people we serve. We need local adaptation, but we need to do so in the context of national thoughts about the kinds of changes that are required. That is easier said than done.”
Mr Stevens has called for quantifying health services, explaining that a more disciplined and rigorous approach needs to be employed to get the desired results. “We do not apply the same disciplines to the way we go about innovating in our service delivery that we would expect clinical professionals to apply. We need to get much more quantitative about how we do things in the NHS.”
