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Whole person care

Posted by Kate Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston, at 10:13, Fri 25 January 2013:

Andy Burnham gave a major speech this week on his vision for the future of healthcare.

It was a brilliant description of what great integrated care would look like.

Except he doesn’t call it integrated care.

It’s all about people. So he calls it “whole person care”.

In his speech, Andy highlighted the pressures our NHS and local authority social care services face. A nurse he’d met described the problem starkly: when she’d first qualified, it was rare to see someone in their 80s on a hospital ward after a major operation.

But our ageing society means there are now ever greater numbers of very frail people in their 80s and 90s on wards, with intensive physical, mental and social care needs.

Hospitals haven’t changed to reflect this new reality. They can’t cope properly. As a result, Andy said, they’re in danger of becoming warehouses of older people.

Shocking language, but a terrible truth when our NHS isn’t geared up to help people get back home as quickly as possible to recover, when budgets are focused on hospitals and care homes, and when there’s no financial incentive or mechanism to redirect spending to care for people at home.

For the want of spending a few hundred pounds in the home, we end up with hospital bills for thousands.

That’s not sustainable. And more important, it’s not even giving people what they want.

So we need another better vision.

A vision of one service co-ordinating all of one person’s needs: physical, mental and social.

Bringing together health and social care. Investing in prevention rather than picking up the pieces. Enabling people to be cared for, for longer, at home.

Delivering Andy’s “whole person care”.

But this approach would mean a huge change of emphasis for hospitals. They’d be paid more for keeping people comfortable at home rather than admitting them.

A radical, incredibly challenging, bold, ambition.

But isn’t being comfortable at home what we most want when we’re poorly? I know how thrilled and delighted my dad was to be back at home when he came out of hospital after his heart attack last year.

It’s helped him to make an amazing recovery.

I’ve been thinking very deeply about what Andy’s vision would mean for us here in Trafford.

I’ve said all along that I want more emphasis on preventative healthcare, and keeping people out of hospital for longer.

But Andy goes further - he sees a new model for District General Hospitals at the heart of that approach.

Though his vision would mean hospitals like Trafford would evolve over time into a fundamentally different entity: as integrated care providers from home to hospital.

And that’s already happening in Torbay. There, around 200 beds have been taken out from the local hospital without any great argument, as families gain other things they truly value.

They have one point of contact for the co-ordination of health and care needs.

Occupational therapists visit homes the same day or the day after they are requested; urgent aids and adaptations are supplied in minutes, not days.

If an older person has to go into hospital, a care worker provides support on the ward, and ensures the right package of care is in place to help get them back home as soon as possible.

That’s the service that families want for their loved ones. That’s what I want in Trafford too.

But Andy said one more thing that will be really important to people in Trafford - this week of all weeks, when local NHS managers are recommending changes to emergency care and A+E.

If we can change the fundamental design of the way our hospitals work in the way he describes, Andy said we can also respond to people’s desire to protect acute and back-stop A+E services locally.

This week, I think he moved the debate onto a whole new level. I’m inspired by the vision he’s described.

I hope that locally we can all come together now to work out what this can mean for us here in Trafford, and for the future for our hospital. It’s so important that we get this right.

Kate Green

Member of Parliament for Stretford and Urmston

Shadow Minister for Equalities

tel: 0161 749 9120 (constituency); 020 7219 7162 (Westminster)

www.kategreen.org

@KateGreenSU