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Webchat with Lord Darzi

Lord Darzi will be taking questions on the National Health Service at a Downing Street webchat this Thursday (3 July) from 9.30am.

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Lord Darzi's review

By putting patients' wishes first and giving doctors and nurses the freedom to respond to those wishes and offer the safest and most effective treatments, his proposals will transform the quality of care that patients receive.

After a 12-month review, led by 2,000 clinicians and staff across the country and involving 60,000 patients, public and staff, Lord Darzi has set out proposals that will give patients more choice, and information, reward the hospitals and clinics that offer both the highest quality of care, and provide the most responsive services.

The enormous investment that the health service has seen over the past eight years has led to more staff, faster access to care and a dramatic reduction in waiting lists. The final report of Lord Darzi's review entitled 'High Quality Care for All', sets out plans that build on this progress and show how innovation and creativity of staff can further improve services.

The changes will be driven not through top-down targets but by giving responsibility to the staff at local level. The values that led to the creation of the NHS 60 years ago will be enshrined in a new Constitution, as well as setting out for the first time the rights of all patients.

Lord Darzi said: "As a surgeon I know how vital it is to balance the quality of the patient's experience - a clean and safe environment, being treated with compassion dignity and respect - with the success of the treatment they receive.

"By measuring this quality across the service and publishing that information for the first time, both staff and patients can work together to make better informed choices about their care.

"By setting clearer standards, and recognising and rewarding innovation in quality, we can keep pace with the very latest advances in medicine and technology. By investing in additional health centres and services for GPs the NHS will diagnose illness faster and help people to stay healthy, as well as treating them when they are sick."

The report sets out how the NHS will:

Giving patients more information and choice

• the NHS Constitution will put privacy, dignity and cleanliness at the heart of care, with tough new enforcement powers coming in to tackle
• measuring quality of care and outcomes of treatment right across the service and publishing that information for the first time
• the most effective drugs for patients with new right to all NICE-approved drugs, faster approvals process and transparent decision making
• a patient's legal right to choice of any provider, including choice of GP services
• 5000 patients with complex long-term conditions will pilot new personal budgets
• personal care plans for all 15 million patients with a long-term condition

Helping people to stay healthy

• supporting family doctors to help patients stay healthy and investing record amounts in new or improved wellbeing and prevention services that are easy to access
• launching a nationwide 'Reduce Your Risk' campaign to raise awareness of free vascular checks for 40-74 year olds and help people to know when they need to get help
• piloting new approaches to help family doctors, community nurses, hospitals, local authorities and others work across traditional boundaries to provide more joined-up services

Enable frontline staff to initiate and lead change

• no additional top-down targets beyond the minimum standards
• every provider of NHS services will need to systematically measure, analyse and improve quality, displaying it to staff through 'clinical dashboards' to measure their performance and use the information to make continuous improvements
• a clinical voice at every level - to ensure decisions are based on the best medical evidence
• enhancing professionalism. There will be investment in new programmes of clinical leadership, with all clinicians encouraged to be practitioners, partners and leaders in the NHS

Fully support NHS staff

• establishing NHS Medical Education England - an independent, advisory non-departmental body that will scrutinise workforce planning proposals for doctors and dentists, as well as bringing a coherent professional voice on matters relating to education and training. Work will be taken forward with other professions to decide what other national advisory bodies are required
• tripling investment in foundation periods for nurses - a new period of preceptorship for nurses at the start of their careers, which will provide newly qualified staff with protected time and support as they move into practice for the first time
• a new tariff-based system for education funding - for the first time education funding will follow the trainee, which will improve transparency, promote fairness and reward quality.

Further information

Lord Darzi's report is available on the Our NHS website.

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