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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    The next stage of the journey My career is dedicated to improving continuously the quality of care we provide for patients. This is what inspires me and my professional colleagues, and it has been the guiding principle for this Review. We need to continue the NHS journey of improvements and move from an NHS that has rightly focused on increasing the quantity of care to one that focuses on improving the quality of care. There is still much more to do to achieve this. | have continued my clinical practice while leading the Review nationally. | have seen and treated patients every week. Maintaining that personal connection with patients has helped me understand the improvements we still need to make. It has driven me to focus this Review on practical action. It is because of this that | have been joined in this Review by 2,000 clinicians and other health and social care professionals from every NHS region in England. Their efforts, in considering the best available evidence and in setting out their own visions for high quality services (described in Chapter 7), have been the centrepiece of this process. Their visions — developed in discussion with patients, carers and members of the general public — set out bold and ambitious plans. | am excited by the local leadership they demonstrate and the commitment of all those who have been involved. In developing the visions, the NHS has had to face up to significant variations in the quality of care that is provided. Summary letter Tackling this will be our first priority. The NHS needs to be flexible to respond to the needs of local communities, but people need to be confident that Standards are high across the board. Delivering the visions will mean tackling head on those variations in the quality of care and giving patients more information and choice. The message they send is that the programme of reform that has been put in place has been unevenly applied and can go much further. We also need to accelerate change for other reasons. Chapter 2 describes the changes facing society and healthcare systems around the world. It sets out how the NHS in the 21% century faces a particular set of challenges, which | would summarise as: rising expectations; demand driven by demographics; the continuing development of our ‘information society’; advances in treatments; the changing nature of disease; and changing expectations of the health workplace. These are challenges we cannot avoid. The NHS should anticipate and respond to the challenges of the future. My conclusions, and the measures described in this report, focus on how we can accelerate the changes that frontline staff want to make to meet those challenges, whilst continuing to raise standards. The vision this report sets out is of an NHS that gives patients and the public more information and choice, works in partnership and has quality of care at its heart — quality defined as clinically