From the Rockies to the Rhondda
If we are to build twenty-first century health services in Wales, there are two challenges in particular that we have to address:-
- How to ensure that our hospitals are used appropriately and effectively. They are under unsustainable pressure and are the most expensive part of our health system, costing over £2000 a week for each bed. We need to provide better care for patients in their communities, whether at home or in local health facilities, and use our hospitals for care that can only be given in the sophisticated specialised facilities they provide.
- How to ensure that the whole NHS is able to meet the needs of patients with chronic health conditions. Already, patients with such conditions as diabetes, asthma and heart disease are by far the single biggest group of NHS patients; they also account for around 60% of hospital bed-days. The incidence of chronic conditions is set to increase further; indeed, they have been called the twenty-first century healthcare challenge. This is why we must look for more effective ways of caring for those with chronic illness outside of the already over-stretched and often inappropriate hospital environment.
These are big challenges, but they are not insurmountable. The Welsh NHS Confederation, along with a range of other organisations, recently published a view of how the NHS could look in 2015, called A Picture of Health. This picture is of an NHS that succeeded in meeting these challenges, delivering better care for patients in their communities, and making better use of hospitals. These are also key objectives of Designed For Life, the 10-year strategy for the NHS recently published by the Welsh Assembly Government. Already in 2005, we are starting to address these challenges, with good work across Wales showing where the future is already happening. But we need to make further progress, and to help us on our way we need to look and learn from success and good practice elsewhere.
With this in mind the Welsh NHS Confederation and Pfizer organised a visit to see the health services offered by Kaiser Permanente, whose effective and innovative approach to long-term conditions has attracted a lot of interest in the UK. We wanted to see, first hand, how they delivered care to their patients, and whether there is anything that can be applied in Wales. In this document, we share our impressions of what we saw, and suggest some lessons that Wales could learn to ensure that we can develop health services that are truly fit for the twenty-first century.
Launch event pictures