The health service needs to not worry about who controls neighbourhoods going forward, the chief executive of NHS England, Sir James Mackey has said.
Speaking at NHS Confed Expo today (11 June), Sir Jim said leaders had just seen the latest version of the 10-year plan this morning, which he said was ‘really impressive’, with neighbourhood care as a ‘big standout’ part of it.
However, he added that it was important to ‘not turn that into something that becomes a tribal thing where we all argue about who’s in charge of what’.
‘It’s a traditional NHS argument about who has power in a local place,’ he said. ‘We need to not do that, not get too worried about who’s in control.’
He added that there needs to be a clear operating model and accountability, but that neighbourhoods were something that could bring together primary, secondary, community, mental health, local authority and voluntary sectors together.
‘It’s one of those things we need to do together,’ he said.
In his speech, Sir Jim set out three main things that he wanted to focus on this year. These included resetting how the NHS works together and reducing overprescription from the centre; being more focused on outcomes rather than inputs; and ‘releasing’ the ambition within the NHS to deliver change at pace.
He said: ‘These are hard things to do, but there’s a very, very strong intent, from our perspective, to work with colleagues, flatten the hierarchy, work alongside each other and change the relationship between each other.
‘We have to pick up pace in all of this. So, we need a different operating model that trusts people with clear rules and allows people to get ahead of the game and on with what you all want to do.’
He added that the NHS has the funding that ‘the country can afford to give us’ and that it needs to deliver better value for that money.
‘It’s a huge amount of money by any, any standards,’ he said. ‘The government’s done us a really good turn compared to other parts of the public service. But it’s not going to allow us all to just take our feet off the pedal and just run loose and do what we want to do in this period, we’ve still got an awful lot of difficult things to do.’
It comes as the chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a £29bn funding boost for the NHS in the spending review.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse PCN.
