Dr Penny Dash has this week delivered the findings of extensive review into patient safety across the health and care landscape in England. The bodies examined included the Care Quality Commission and Healthwatch England.
Dr Dash concluded that despite the numbers of nurses and doctors increasing by over a third since 2013, outcomes have not improved commensurately. Nor has life expectancy, which has still failed to recover to pre-pandemic levels. To underline this, the report found that a staggering 82,000 preventable deaths were recorded in 2022 alone, predominantly due to ineffectual care.
Over the last decades, many care organisations have been created without adequate strategic planning, leading to confusion and duplication. Therefore, there is a need to streamline, simplify and consolidate functions. Dr Dash also calls for the greater centralisation of functions to commissioners to ensure maximum impact. A disparate and cluttered landscape has meant that previous reviews, inquiries and recommendations have not been sufficiently acted upon.
One of the strongest recommendations, which chimes with the last week’s NHS 10-Year Plan, is increasing the role of technology, data and analytics in supporting the quality of health and social care. The report claims that this would save resources, improve safety and deliver more effective care. Technology upgrades would also allow for patients to provide feedback more easily through the NHS App and allow for this data to be captured. This can then be used to inform policy and service design.
Synchronising data across NHS systems would improve safety by granting commissioners the ability to detect at-risk populations. With this information, neighbourhood teams can then tailor their plans to intervene in cases of greatest need and avoid preventable deaths.
A modern health plan would not be complete without a nod to AI, and this review is no different. By employing AI more strategically across the NHS, poor care could be detected much faster and more simply at a significantly lower cost. However, Dr Dash acknowledges that this data needs to be high quality and shareable and will require investment.
