Have your say in the future of healthcare in Central Norfolk
People in Broadland, Norwich, North Norfolk and Southern Norfolk will be asked for their views on the local NHS as health chiefs set about looking at how to deliver improved and more patient-focused services for the years to come.
The local NHS faces many challenges including the drive for improved quality and shorter waiting times, plus financial pressures. The views of the public will be vital as the health service locally starts the process of trying to redesign better quality and more efficient services around the needs of patients.
The reform programme, Better Care for Norfolk, will be rolled out over the next three to five years. It sets out to look at new and more responsive ways of delivering health and social care in central Norfolk. Local patients and staff in Broadland, Norwich, North Norfolk and Southern Norfolk are starting to get involved with the plans to see how the standard of care can be raised by learning from the best on offer locally, nationally and internationally.
Views will be sought on how services can:
- give more support to people with long-term chronic illnesses
- reduce unnecessary and distressing emergency admissions to hospital
- improve access to services for patients
- move care closer to patients' homes where appropriate
- best support patients in keeping well and independent.
Further opportunities will be available at a number of workshops to be held around the county throughout the coming months. In the meantime, people can find out more and give their views through the Better Care for Central Norfolk website at www.bettercarefornorfolk.nhs.uk.
Phyllis Shelton, Director of Performance Improvement and Organisational Development for the Central Norfolk health and social care system, said:
“We all want to provide the right care in the right place at the right time by the right people and that will help us be more efficient and make better use of the considerable resources being spent by the NHS in central Norfolk (£450 million a year). And no one is better placed to help inform the reform programme than the people who use our services so we are asking the public how they would like to see services delivered in the future.”
The organisations which make up Better Care for Norfolk are the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust, Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (formerly know as the Norfolk Mental Health Care NHS Trust), Norfolk County Council Social Services, the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust and the four Primary Care Trusts – Broadland, North Norfolk, Norwich and Southern Norfolk. The Norfolk Suffolk and Cambridgeshire Strategic Health Authority is also supporting the plans.
Notes to editors
The proposed timetable for Better Care for Norfolk is as follows:
April – June 2004
- Briefings for key organisations
- Sharing ideas, raising awareness of plans
- Gathering patient views – surveys and focus groups
July – Sept 2004
- Formal consultation period on proposed new ideas for health and social care and key changes
- Publicising proposals, seeking views
October 2004
- Feedback results of consultation
- Brief Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee and other key groups
- Agree the way forward with key stakeholders
- Better Care for Norfolk is linked to a number of initiatives that are already underway in the county, such as Living Longer, Living Well: Norfolk's Older People's Strategy and the Norfolk County Council's proposals for children's services following publication of the Government's Green Paper 'Every Child Matters'.
- It is also linked with the national programme for clinical excellence, called Pursuing Perfection and is also known as the Central Norfolk Transformation Strategy. Pursuing Perfection is an international healthcare improvement initiative led by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. It seeks to dramatically improve outcomes for patients in all the major care processes. The NHS Modernisation Agency actively participates in the Pursuing Perfection initiative and has set up four NHS healthcare communities as pilot sites. These are Central Norfolk, Bradford, Lambeth and Southwark, and North and East Devon. The vision for Pursuing Perfection is no avoidable death or disease, no needless pain or harm, no delays, no waste, no helplessness, and no inequity.