Kidney Care UK, in partnership with nine other leading patient organisations, is calling for care coordination to become a central focus of the government's planned NHS reforms.
Our Partnership for Change has published its first report, Connected Care: Transforming Care Coordination. With this report, we are urging the government to be ambitious in tackling this fundamental need for kidney patients and all patient communities in the UK.
The Partnership for Change is brought together and funded by Pfizer.
For many, the NHS is one of Britain's great achievements, but recent reports have shown that public satisfaction with the service has reached an all-time low. The development of the new NHS 10 Year Health Plan gives us an opportunity to look back at past challenges, and think imaginatively about how care could delivered for patients in the UK.
We have joined forces with other leading patient organisations to understand the real challenges that patients face in their interactions with the health service. One theme comes up, again and again: poor coordination of patient care.
Poor care coordination: much more than an inconvenience
Many patients find themselves trapped in a cycle of repeating their health story and medical history, chasing referrals, and making their way through a disconnected system. The burden of managing the coordination of their care often falls on the patients themselves, or their carers.
This makes the system hard to access for people who are less advocate for themselves (for many reasons), and frustrating for those who can. It's more than an inconvenience: poor coordination of care can make a patient's experience much worse. It can lead to delayed diagnoses, missed treatments, and eventually poorer health outcomes. Poor care coordination can also make health inequalities in our society even more damaging and harder to challenge.
Seven steps to better care coordination
In Connected Care: Transforming Care Coordination, Kidney Care UK and our partners recommend taking seven steps to improving care coordination:
- Strive for simple, clear communication between health services and patients: Timely, accurate communication between healthcare professionals and patients, with clear roles and responsibilities within healthcare services.
- Elevate patient experience to equal importance with clinical excellence: Health services must demonstrate that they value patient experience by prioritising patient feedback alongside clinical effectiveness and safety, and involving patients in care planning.
- Develop a framework for acting on existing patient experience data: Systematically collect, organise, and use patient experience data, basing accountability and commissioning on these outcomes.
- Promote a culture of collaboration and coordination through existing networks, using a proactive behaviour/culture change approach: Shift from siloed working to a culture of collaboration, fostering trust, safety, and a shared purpose between organisations. Look for ways to build collaboration from the ground up, in addition to promoting collaboration from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), by identifying and scaling-up successful local care coordination initiatives.
- Develop the digital facilitation of care coordination: Use digital tools, like the NHS app, to enhance coordination while maintaining strong interpersonal relationships and respecting digital preferences.
- Focus on transitions: Use care coordinators to ensure smooth transitions between all transition points, such as between primary and secondary care and between child, adolescent and adult care, particularly for complex, rare, and long-term conditions.
- Involve the voluntary and community sector (VCS): Ensure VCS involvement in decision-making and signposting, given their crucial role in the health services landscape.
Partnership for Change
We are one of ten leading patient organisations, brought together and funded by Pfizer, representing a large spectrum of patient communities: