By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 14 October 2013
The National Health Service in Scotland will be reformed to provide genuine 24-hour, seven-day-a-week services, Health Secretary Alex Neil has told an international conference in Edinburgh.
He unveiled a £4m funding package to pilot innovative international approaches to 24/7 healthcare in five health board areas: Greater Glasgow & Clyde, Borders, Tayside, Forth Valley and Lanarkshire. Ministers have in mind practices from both continental Europe and North America.
Neil also announced that a specialist NHS and Scottish Government taskforce was being created to drive through the reforms. He said he wanted it to report ‘very soon’ on how changes would be made.
Speaking just days after an Audit Scotland report warned of coming financial pressures in Scottish health provision, Neil told the International Society for Quality in Health Care conference that he wanted to see the flow of patients through Scotland’s hospitals made more consistent across the week and the clock.
He broadly backed a recent report from the Royal College of Physicians, which called for the role of hospital physicians to be extended into the community, for the care available to acute patients – including consultants’ presence – to be the same on weekends as weekdays and for measures to end delays in hospital discharges.
Neil acknowledged that quality healthcare was already available round the clock in Scottish hospitals, and promised that patient safety would remain central to provision. But, he said, delivery of care varied between different times. ‘While the quality and safety doesn’t vary, the NHS must be a genuinely seven-day service where it needs to be,’ he said.
‘It should mean that pharmacists, physiotherapists, porters – all the services you need to help patients move through and be discharged from hospital – are on hand every day of the week.’
Neil accepted that primary care is already available 24/7 and that some parts of the country were already working towards week-round services, but said he wanted both to accelerate change and to make it universal.
The reforms, and new money, were welcomed by the Association of Medical Directors, while Elizabeth Stow, the staff-side chair of the Scottish Terms and Conditions Committee, said staff were committed to seeing patients receive the right services when needed, and would continue to work closely with government and management to negotiate any changes which benefited patients.
