The NHS has invited expressions of interest from hospitals across England interested in developing new ways of delivering and improving their local acute services.
The aim is ‘to enhance the viability of local hospitals through new formal shared working arrangements between clinical specialists at different hospitals, and to improve efficiency by sharing back office administration and management between different sites’.
The new ‘vanguard’ sites, to be developed as part of implementing the Five Year Forward View, build on the proposals in the recent report from Sir David Dalton. Of the ‘vanguards’, NHS England CEO, Simon Stevens, said: “Rather than automatically assuming that centralised, ‘bigger is better’, we want to test new ways of sustaining local NHS hospital services, with more sharing of medical expertise across sites, and more efficiency from shared back office administration.”
The main focus – led by Monitor, the NHS Trust Development Authority, and NHS England – will be to support providers of acute services to develop new arrangements that can be replicated across England ‘at scale’, and for the new models to improve quality, productivity and efficiency. Invitations are now being sought from all providers of acute services – including small hospitals.
Applicants will be expected to demonstrate how their proposals will help promote the health and well-being of the populations they serve, increasing the quality and ‘person-centeredness’ of care, and ‘improve efficiency for the taxpayer within available resources’. The initiative completes the plan for a new generation of care models put forward in the NHS Five Year Forward View to transform the way care is delivered across the NHS.
Samantha Jones, director of the New Care Models programme, said: “The Five Year Forward View set out the need to do things differently across the NHS to continue to provide world-class care for patients in a clinically and financially sustainable way; pioneering new models of care is key to realising that ambition.
Paul Dinkin, national lead for the New Models of Acute Care Collaboration, and a Provider sustainability director at Monitor, said: “The new vanguards will be supported to rethink their clinical models beyond existing organisational boundaries or their local health care system. Ways of preserving local access to sustainable high quality services, and reducing variations in the quality and cost of care, may be through innovative forms of accountable clinical networks, creating chains of multiple NHS organisations, or setting up speciality NHS franchises.”
While the 29 current vanguards are “about moving specialist care into the community, joining up GP, community and mental health services and offering better ‘joined-up care’ for people in care homes, the new additional sites will focus on promoting collaboration between acute providers.
NHS England said: “In the light of the findings of the Dalton Review, these new models may include greater use of clinical networks across nearby sites, joint ventures between NHS organisations, or the delivery of specialist single services across a number of different providers.”
The closing date for applications is the end of July, and the programme anticipates announcing a small number of vanguard sites by September. Successful applicants ‘will be expected to make swift progress’, and will receive financial and practical support to help them do so. The new care models programme is backed by the £200 million Transformation Fund.
