Chapter 1 Introduction
Delivering For Health:
The Planned Care Improvement Programme is a key element in the national Delivering for Health Planned Care Work-stream, it is a national level action and in common with other national improvement programmes, all Health Boards are expected to participate in the programme.
In implementing Delivering for Health, boards have been tasked with achieving the shift in the balance of care. Boards should have projects planned to rebalance their portfolio of services and ensure improvements are made in productivity and capacity, whilst sustaining improvements in waiting times, and reducing the need for hospital admissions.
This exciting two year programme will build upon the improvement endeavours of the Outpatient Programme and will work closely with the Unscheduled Care Collaborative, the Diagnostics Collaborative and the Eye Care Redesign and Cataract Programme. The programme will draw upon the growing body of clinical systems improvement science from across the world and provide a framework to allow the application of these evidence based changes and best practice to create local solutions for local problems.
Strategic vision for the next 5 years
Shifting the Balance of Care
Diagnostics
Child & Mental Health
Unscheduled Care
Rural Health
Mental Health Services
Tackling Health Inequalities
Long Term Conditions
e-Health
Actively managing hospital admissions/planned care |  |
In implementing Delivering for Health, NHS Boards have been tasked with achieving the shift in the balance of care. Boards should have projects planned to rebalance their portfolio of services and ensure improvements are made in productivity and capacity, whilst sustaining improvements in waiting times and reducing the need for hospital admissions.
Integral to delivering these improvements will be the implementation of the 5 simple changes identified in the Kerr report. Boards should have produced 3-year improvement plans to introduce and implement the changes listed below.
- Improve referral and diagnostic pathways;
- Treat day surgery (rather than inpatient surgery) as the norm;
- Actively manage admissions to hospital;
- Actively manage discharge and length of stay;
- Actively manage follow up.
Implementation of these improvements will enable the NHS in Scotland to make further progress in the delivery of efficient patient focused services by improving access, flow and safety along planned care journeys, enabling more care to be delivered locally, ensuring that patient pathways are planned in advance, and that patients have a seamless experience and are informed about their programme of care.
Programme Vision
The vision of the programme is to improve the flow of patients along their healthcare journey by ensuring their experience of assessment, diagnosis and treatment is based on augmented, safe and reliable clinical systems.
The Planned Care Improvement Programme will support NHS boards to raise their performance to the standard of the best and ensure that they systematically implement the five simple changes described in Delivering for Health as well as further spreading the use of support processes such as Patient Focused Booking and Referral Management Services to support the changes in the healthcare delivery process in Scotland.
Programme Goals:
- Improving the patient experience by the delivery of care at the right time in the right place by the right person.
- Promoting a culture of improvement based on rigorous data analysis and common principles that empower clinical teams to transform the way they deliver their services from existing resources.
- Leading a whole system change in how we provide planned care by the identification, spread and adoption of good practices in Planned Care.
- Promoting data management to support innovation and performance improvement, national and local measures will be developed with regular national reporting to ensure that performance improvement is taking place within local sites and nationally across the programme.
- Promotion of sound system and process design making sure that variation from non-standardised processes is eliminated. The regular collection of good quality data will help to support robust, tested business cases for such investment.
- Developing robust and streamlined patient booking and referral management systems to improve access and confidence to patients and GPs by improving flow of information between clinicians and patients, primary and secondary care and within clinical teams.