Health chiefs in Cheshire are eager to get patients treated in the right place and relieve pressure on hospitals, writes Stephen Topping.
Key NHS figures from across the county spoke out about the challenges they face and their ambitions at a Cheshire East Council meeting.
It comes less than a month before the four bodies that plan and buy NHS services across the county merge to form one clinical commissioning group (CCG).
Clare Watson (pictured), accountable officer for both the four current CCGs and the new Cheshire CCG, said: “The commissioning intentions are about how Cheshire CCG looks to commission high quality and safe care for the population.
“It isn’t about commissioning services from a building or a site.
“Our responsibility and accountability is on behalf of the total population of Cheshire.
“If we do more together in the community, if we can focus more on early intervention and prevention and stop people coming into hospital, that will then have an impact on the organisation.
“But it is better for the population not to be part of the NHS in terms of being a patient, and we work really hard to keep residents as people rather than patients, because I think that is really important.”
Cheshire commissioners have spent £1.18 billion in 2019-20, with 52.6% of that money currently going to NHS trusts, the vast majority of which is spent on hospital services.
The county’s new CCG – which will launch on April 1 – expects to reduce that to 50.5% by 2023-24, and will aim to cut that further to 48%.
That means extra cash can be pumped into community health services, general practice, mental health services and even the voluntary sector – which provides essential support for many vulnerable residents across the county.
James Sumner, chief executive of Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Victoria Infirmary and Leighton Hospital, agrees with the idea of providing more resources for community services to help relieve the strain on hospitals.
He said: “Hospitals used to be the place you went for a very specialist opinion on one thing.
“We are becoming as generalist as anywhere else now.
“A lot of this is about how we start to look at a different delivery of care for [patients with multiple needs] at a local level to try and ease that pressure on the care system.
“Otherwise we will all be doing the same thing, which is trying to recruit people who aren’t there.”
Cheshire’s NHS is being further transformed with the development of two integrated care partnerships (ICPs) – one for Cheshire East and one for Cheshire West – along with 14 ‘care communities’ that work at a more local level.
The idea is that health and social care providers will work closely together in the two ICPs, while care communities will consider the best way to tackle specific health issues affecting a particular area.
East Cheshire NHS Trust – which runs hospitals in Macclesfield, Knutsford and Congleton – is particularly vulnerable to rising demand because it is a smaller organisation than Mid Cheshire Hospitals, CEC members were told.
John Wilbraham, chief executive at the trust, told CEC’s health and social care overview and scrutiny committee that the new set-up will look at ‘how we are starting to get the healthcare services and social care services in towns working together’.
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