\n<\/p>\n
Money for hospitals in England is to be linked to patient ratings, ministers have announced, as one of the health bosses tasked with implementing the government\u2019s 10-year plan for the NHS in the country warned it faced an existential threat unless it reconnected with the public.<\/p>\n
The measure, under which healthcare providers could lose a proportion of their funding if patients are unhappy, is part of a package the health secretary hopes will incentivise investment in services that could prevent the need for hospital visits \u2013 and encourage listening to patients more.<\/p>\n
But clinicians have expressed concern the proposal risks performing surgery on the NHS with a blunt instrument, rather than the scalpel required.<\/p>\n
Under the proposals, which were first reported by the Times, patients are to be asked if they would like the full funding for their care to continue to be paid to the service they used, or if a proportion should go to a regional fund instead. According to the Times, about 10% of \u201cstandard payment rates\u201d could be diverted if a patient is unhappy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be introduced where there has been a track record of very poor service and evidence that patients are not being listened to,\u201d the Department for Health and Social Care said on Saturday, adding that it would be run initially as a trial.<\/p>\n
But Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: \u201cNone of our members have raised this idea with us as a way of improving care and, to our knowledge, no other healthcare system internationally adopts this model currently.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cPatient experience is determined by far more than their individual interaction with the clinician and so, unless this is very carefully designed and evaluated, there is a risk that providers could be penalised for more systemic issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other measures are designed to help treat people in the community \u2013 before they need hospitalisation. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said: \u201cIf patients can\u2019t get a GP appointment, which costs the NHS about \u00a340, they end up in A&E, which costs as much as \u00a3400.\u201d<\/p>\n
It came as the new head of the NHS in England said the service had \u201cbuilt mechanisms to keep the public away\u201d. Sir Jim Mackey told the Telegraph: \u201cWe\u2019ve made it really hard, and we\u2019ve probably all been on the end of it. You\u2019ve got a relative in hospital, so you\u2019re ringing a number on a ward that no one ever answers. The ward clerk only works nine to five, or they\u2019re busy doing other stuff; the GP practice scrambles every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mackey warned that the disconnection between NHS services and the public could result in the loss of the public health service altogether. \u201cThe big worry is: if we don\u2019t grab that, and we don\u2019t deal with it with pace, we\u2019ll lose the population. If we lose the population, we\u2019ve lost the NHS.\u201d<\/p>\n
Streeting said on Wednesday that the government\u2019s 10-year plan would also aim to \u201caddress one of the starkest health inequalities\u201d, which he claimed was the unequal access to information and choice when it came to healthcare.<\/p>\n
Mackey said: \u201cWe\u2019ve got to somehow reorientate it; think about how do we find people who need us, how do we stop thinking: \u2018It\u2019s going to be a pain in the arse if you turn up because I\u2019m quite busy,\u2019 and instead think about how do we find out what you need and get it sorted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Money for hospitals in England is to be linked to patient ratings, ministers have announced, as one of the health bosses tasked with implementing the government\u2019s 10-year plan for the NHS in the country warned it faced an existential threat unless it reconnected with the public. The measure, under which healthcare providers could lose a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[311,116,37,578,321,1229,2252,328,2253,2251],"class_list":{"0":"post-9732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-england","9":"tag-funding","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-hospital","12":"tag-ministers","13":"tag-nhs","14":"tag-patient","15":"tag-policy","16":"tag-ratings","17":"tag-tied"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}