Whose NHS Is It Anyway? National Online Debate About NHS Accountability

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 20 Oct 2009 - 19:00 PDT

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The new NHS Constitution says "The NHS belongs to the people". What does that really mean to patients, carers, NHS board members, GPs, nurses and leaders at local and national level?

To help answer some of these questions, the NHS Alliance is launching a UK-wide online debate about accountability in the NHS. To kick off the debate, which begins on 20 October and will last six weeks, the NHS Alliance produced a position paper Whose NHS is it anyway. The organisation is looking to engage political leaders, health professionals, trade unions, local government, the third sector, patients and everyone who has a stake in the NHS.

Dr Brian Fisher, national public and patient involvement lead for the NHS Alliance, said: "Patient and public involvement throughout the NHS is accepted as a general principle and has a great future. We now have an opportunity to debate how we can best embed PPI throughout the NHS and make it a vibrant tool for those key processes that need to be active everywhere: accountability, safety, service redesign, efficiency. But how best can we do this? Share accountability with your local authority? Have elected members as in Scotland? Use community development? Join in the debate, make your points and we can use your ideas and dynamism to drive the arguments forward."

Joan Saddler, national director of patient and public affairs for the Department of Health, said: "Some services are already leaders when it comes to systematically listening, understanding and acting upon people's needs and experiences but we need to make this the norm across the NHS. "The engagement of people in the their own care and in the shaping of local services leads to new ideas, improved quality, high productivity and better relations. We welcome this debate and look forward to finding out how people think the NHS can do more to put patients at the heart of its work."

Participants are asked to answer six questions about NHS accountability as well as contribute practical suggestions of how patient and public can be involved in a meaningful way. A white paper summarising the views of the debate will be published in at the end of the year.

Whose NHS is it anyway? To take part in the online debate, log on to http://healthcaregovernance.typepad.com/whose_nhs_is_it_anyway/.

Source
NHS Alliance

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