NHSE chief executive Sir James Mackey yesterday (June 11) revealed details of “the latest version” of the government’s 10-year health plan to the NHS Confed Expo 2025 in Manchester.
He told delegates that while finalising the plan means getting “more and more frustrated as you go [because] content gets challenged and sort of diluted, it is still really, really impressive”.
He said that plans for neighbourhood care will have “lots of energy”, adding that “that part of the plan is still really a standout for me”.
Read more: NHS 10-yr plan ‘very GP centric’ but pharmacy role must ‘grow’
Mackey said that he has been “belligerent” about including financial reform and incentives “connected to the neighbourhood care” in the plan.
But he also revealed concerns from NHS officials about delivering the promised shift from hospital to community.
“You feel the anxiety”
“We’re all worried – everyone’s worried, you feel the anxiety,” Mackey said.
“We’ve talked about neighbourhood care and the shift for years and years and years – decades,” he added.
“We’ve never managed to do it on any scale or for any period, and more often ended up with duplicate costs,” he said.
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“This can’t happen this time,” he stressed.
“We’ve got this terrible situation where you can’t even shift all the work outside hospitals [and] you can’t release the funds,” he said.
Read more: NHS 10-year plan: Government ‘lazy and limited’ on prevention
He added that NHS officials will aim to “free [funding] up and allow the movement to happen so if you do something locally, you’ll get paid for it and if that stops the flow in the hospital everybody wins”.
“The problem is when it doesn’t work,” he warned.
“Losing control”
Mackey told delegates that anxieties about “who’s going to run what” in new healthcare neighbourhoods is “a traditional NHS argument”.
“We need to not do that - not get too worried about losing control,” he added.
It comes as an NHSE official yesterday said that while GPs will play a “very” central role in the 10-year health plan, the role of community pharmacy is “increasingly emerging” and needs to “grow”.
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Both pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock and NHSE chief pharmaceutical officer (CPhO) David Webb have previously said that pharmacy would play a “key role” and be “critical” to the 10-year plan.
Meanwhile, healthcare leaders have said that “radical reform” is needed in the government’s 10-year health plan, with some arguing that its approach to prevention is “lazy and limited”.
In April, former chair and president of the National Association of Primary Care (NAPC) Professor James Kingsland stressed that “we need to see something very different” in the plan.
