Field puts info on NHS 'to do' list

Professor Steve Field

The NHS Future Form has written to health secretary Andrew Lansley, recommending that patients have access to their health records and more information about the performance of healthcare organisations.

The NHS Future Forum decided to look at information, training and other issues after completing the ‘listening exercise’ on the government’s reforms that it was asked to conduct this summer.

It has now issued an interim advice letter to Lansley in an attempt to get some of its recommendations into next year’s Operating Framework for the NHS in England.

Chairman Professor Steve Field says that the forum’s final report will influence the information strategy that the Department of Health has been promising since the start of the year. But the forum wants to see information high on the NHS’ ‘to do’ list.

“We would encourage the DH, through the publication of the 2012-13 operating framework, to ensure the importance of information is emphasised to the NHS for next year,” the letter says.

Previous operating frameworks have been influential in shaping NHS IT and information, by encouraging trusts to focus on ‘Clinical 5’ core functionality, and on the ‘connect all’ interoperability agenda.

The letter, signed by seven other forum members, argues that information is an integral part of care and data collection should be embraced rather than seen as a “bureaucratic burden”.

With suitable safeguards in place, it wants information to be “shared between all the organisations involved in caring for [a] person”, with data matching facilitated by use of the NHS Number.

The advice says patients must have better online access to services and to their health and care records, including making use of the Summary Care Record.

It also calls for information about the performance of health and social care services to be published “in a useable and understandable form” as a default position.

The letter also calls on the DH to champion incentives to promote integrated care in the next operating framework, and to make sure there is a “national partnership” between the NHS and the new public health system that will come into operation next year.

Professor Field recommends that Public Health England and the NHS Commissioning Board should set out publicly what their partnership will look like, how they will work together to promote health, and how they will hold each other to account.

Lansley said in a meeting with the forum last week that its interim advice and recommendations were “very useful”.

“We will take them into consideration before we publish the [next] operating framework and further details about the new public health system,” he said.

The NHS Future Forum’s final reports, which will also include recommendations on education and training, will be published towards the end of the year.