The new models of care programme “absolutely won’t be” fully implemented in time to meet the three to five year target laid out in the Five Year Forward View, the chief executive of NHS Providers has said.
Chris Hopson, told delegates at the Westminster Health Forum: “The view that this was going to take three to five years seems, to us, to be really pretty profoundly unstabling. This is a five to 15 year journey.”
The new models of care programme “absolutely won’t be” fully implemented in time to meet the three to five year target laid out in the Five Year Forward View, the chief executive of NHS Providers has said.
Chris Hopson, told delegates at the Westminster Health Forum: “The view that this was going to take three to five years seems, to us, to be really pretty profoundly unstabling. This is a five to 15 year journey.”
Speaking later to The Commissioning Review, Hopson said this was because the various projects “are inevitably at different stages on the journey”.
He added: “The whole programme as it was initially set up had the implication that somehow this would all be working brilliantly at scale in three to five years. It absolutely won’t be.
“If we get the whole country having made good progress within fifteen years, we’ve done really well.”
The Department of Health mandated late last year that the new care models should cover half of the UK population by 2020.
The care models were initially funded through the £200m transformation fund in 2015/16 and are set to receive a further £112 million in 2016/17, after which time NHS England has said they would be funded through the upcoming sustainability and transformation plans (STPs).
However, Hopson told The Commissioning Review that “there is talk of continuing to give that national funding in 17/18” and he is “quite concerned” that withdrawing the funding will see the vanguards “come to a grinding halt”.
He said: “That is one of the questions that we would want to seriously consider. Should we carry on funding them a bit further from a national pot so that we know they get what’s needed?”
And, having seen some of the plans, he added: “Our sense is that some of them are based on moving to new care models and some are based very much on service reconfiguration – effectively closing services and moving services around – which I don’t think are new care models at all.”
