Bringing together integrated neighbourhood teams will take time, according to the government’s preferred candidate to lead NHS England’s board, Dr Penny Dash.
The current chair of North West London ICB was questioned by MPs in a pre-appointment hearing at the Health and Social Care Committee yesterday (26 February).
She emphasised the importance of neighbourhood teams moving forward but said that it would take time to bring them together.
When asked about the ‘primary impediments’ to the desire to shift care from hospitals to the community, she said: ‘One thing is changing the patterns of investment. The second bit is around redesign of that local care. And so there’s a lot of talk at the moment about neighbourhood care, integrated neighbourhood teams.’
She said there would be more clarity on this within the 10-year plan. But she added that the concept of having multidisciplinary teams that work effectively together was already ‘working well’ in places.
‘There are some fantastic examples in this country of that already happening,’ she said. ‘There’s a big need to do more of that, and really helping people to see what are some of those examples of best practice care, and to work out, how do they start to implement those locally?
‘That does require, then a whole host of changes to workforce planning, to estate planning and so on and so forth, as well as some of the productivity opportunities, particularly in the acute sector.’
This echoes plans in NHS England’s neighbourhood health guidelines and operational planning guidance, published earlier this month, which said there was an urgent need to transform the health and care system and an integrated response would be needed. These guidelines suggested that the NHS would ‘build on’ existing cross-team working, such as PCNs, to more towards a neighbourhood health service.
However, Dr Dash told MPs that it was ‘not straightforward’ to bring together neighbourhood teams.
‘There are multiple players. The term is integrated teams. So, it’s teams from social care, from community care, from wider voluntary sector, and so on and so forth. And all those people, quite rightly, at the moment, are focused on their own organisations, and so bringing them together will take time to do,’ she said.
She told MPs that it would also take time to redirect funding from hospitals to primary care, and recognised there had been ‘frustration’ among the latter around the current level of investment.
‘If you can look at what’s happened in terms of the money over the last five years, last 10 years, we have ended up spending more money in the hospital sector than in the primary care sector and the community sector. And I think that needs to be reversed,’ she said. ‘Obviously, you can’t do that overnight, but slowly over time, that needs to happen.’
Dr Dash also suggested there was a ‘gap’ around neighbourhood care on the NHS England non-exec team.
Announced earlier this month as ‘preferred candidate’ for the chair of NHS England, Dr Dash is an NHS doctor with a long history in management consultancy and policy roles. She also led the CQC review which found ‘significant failings’.
Before taking up her current leadership position at North West London ICB in 2021, Dr Dash was a senior partner at the management consultancy McKinsey for many years, and she had also been head of strategy for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the early 2000s.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse PCN.
