Emergency care redesign “focus” in 2015-16 says NHS chief

NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens has said that emergency care redesign needs to be focused on nationally in 2015-16.

In the NHS England 2014-15 Annual Report, Mr Stevens reflected on the Five Year Forward View, which sets out the shared direction for the NHS over the next five years, and what the NHS needs to be doing now: “For the year ahead, NHS England has identified key commissioning priorities for improvement. These include cancer care, mental health, learning disabilities, and obesity and diabetes prevention.

“Our care redesign focus will be on primary care, urgent and emergency care, and maternity services.”

The NHS successfully cared for millions of people in 2014-15; it dealt with more GP visits, 600,000 more A&E attendances, 210,000 more emergency admissions to hospital and 4.1 million more calls to NHS 111 than in the previous year.

But the NHS is still under pressure. It faces a major challenge over the next five years to meet rapidly growing demand from patients at a time when the nation’s finances are under strain.

In response to the Five Year Forward View, the government announced an additional £1.8 billion of funding for the English NHS for the current financial year (2015-16Along with £150 million of funding reprioritised from central programme budgets, this meant that almost £2 billion of additional funding was available for allocation for this financial year.

Overall the government has pledged to invest at least an additional £8 billion in real terms annually in the NHS by 2020-21.

What do you think about the Five Year Forward View? Leave us your comments below.

NHS England shows demand in numbers:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published 1st August 2015