Third sector to the rescue with new NHS business model
July 2010
The NHS, alongside all other healthcare systems in the developed world will soon run out of cash. So the way it does business needs to go back to the drawing board.
The former senior health adviser to Tony Blair, Professor Paul Corrigan, has written a report for ACEVO on the role of the third sector in developing significantly better healthcare outputs for the same level of resource.
He calls for a new business model to ensure a sustainable NHS into the future because in the current one ‘the patient is simply a sponge on value’ where ‘the more very old people there are, the more value is sucked form the providers of value.’
The report goes on to explain why the third sector is a key contributor of ‘new value’ from outside the mainstream of the NHS institution. This is founded in public trust and the fact the public will volunteer for the sector – something they won’t do for the publica and private sectors. ‘Also, the third sector has a goal of empowering people while it is working with them. It is not just good enough for them to ‘deliver’ a good service; they must ensure that the person receiving the service has more power at the end of the interaction than at the beginning’, says Corrigan.
One important change is for the NHS to become an organisation where ‘people with long-term conditions would expect they would be developed into much more active patients.’ This reduces the cost because of fewer hospital admissions and a lower dependency on high levels of medical staff time and drugs. It is the sector’s ability to get patients actively involved in trying to improve their own lives that is key to the cost saving – and improved outcome for the patient.
Commissioning skills are also an issue – as nearly all NHS commissioners have little experience outside the NHS or of commissioning services from non NHS providers: ‘what the third sector experiences is being systematically shut out of the NHS market, which, if they were allowed into, they could transform.’
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