The NHS Long Term Plan: How will it unfold in 2020?

Oli Hudson, content director at Wilmington Healthcare, explores what the Long Term Plan means for medtech in the year ahead.

The Tories’ recent General Election win has cemented key NHS Long Term Plan commitments, including integrated care, which will continue apace in 2020, bringing fundamental changes to medtech’s customer base.

In this article, we will explore the impact of the Long Term Plan on industry this year, drawing on extensive resources in Wilmington Healthcare’s Digital Learning Academy – the leading online learning platform for the life sciences industry that focuses on the NHS and its sales environment.

New service models

A third of the country is already covered by an Integrated Care System (ICS) and 100% ICS coverage is now expected across England by April 2021. Typically, there will be one Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) per ICS area which will necessitate further CCG mergers.

ICSs will be part of a three-tier system that includes Integrated Care Providers or Partnerships (ICPs), and Primary Care Networks (PCNs). Aligned with PCNs are new multi-disciplinary teams with staff drawn from social care and the wider community, including police and housing departments, as well as healthcare.

Identifying key stakeholders who are likely to influence procurement in these new and emerging organisations, as well as the clinicians who will use medtech devices, is going to be a big challenge for industry. It will require access to sophisticated stakeholder databases and intelligence tools to map contacts and tailor messages.

Finance

Some ICSs have already dispensed with standard Payment by Results (PBR) contracts and are operating more integrated budgets. For example, Dorset ICS runs “a family budgeting system”, where money has already moved from one organisation to another to achieve balance across the system. These ICSs are trailblazers which all other health systems are under pressure to emulate within the next few years.

Delivering savings across the whole system will be crucial; hence medtech must think more about how its products can help to deliver wider efficiencies aligned with key Long Term Plan ambitions such as keeping people out of hospital, where possible. This involves thinking about the wider cost implications of a product such as failure rates, inpatient stays and infection rates.

Prevention

Population health, which aims to improve patient outcomes and reduce health inequalities for entire populations, including people who are not currently in need of NHS treatment, is a key tenet of the Long Term Plan. To deliver it, the NHS needs actionable data to determine what is happening in specific localities with regards to the burden of disease; patient outcomes and numbers of high risk or high cost patients.

For example, Public Health’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment data can be broken down to determine what is happening in specific parts of a council ward, where there might be pockets of deprivation in an otherwise affluent area. This detail might show that respiratory conditions are unusually prevalent in specific locations and impacting on winter hospital admissions.

This type of insight could be invaluable to medtech which has a powerful role to play in helping the NHS deliver more preventative and proactive care strategies. Respiratory conditions are a good example since they are a key disease area focus in the Long Term Plan and one where innovative devices, such as smart inhalers, can enable proactive interventions and promote selfcare.

Quality and Outcomes

Reducing unwarranted variation in patient outcomes and spending is vital for the NHS and two organisations that are working in this area - NHS RightCare and Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) – are closely aligned with the Long Term Plan.

NHS RightCare has developed scenarios to compare the impact of ideal and sub-optimal care on patient outcomes and costs. Its recommended pathways are highly significant since they are being built into local healthcare services in areas including CVD, respiratory care and cancer.

GIRFT aims to reduce unwarranted variation in hospital care. It looks at the best way to run a specialty in terms of staffing, techniques, products and resources.  

Its work is highly significant for medtech, given that procurement savings are a big priority for the NHS, particularly with regards to reducing unwarranted variation and this will become easier to measure with integrated budgets and multi-year contracts.

Conclusion

With a rapidly evolving NHS structure, new stakeholders and an increasingly joined-up, holistic approach to service delivery, 2020 promises to be a challenging year for medtech companies looking to engage with the NHS.

It will be vital to think about the bigger picture and determine how a product could deliver added value across an entire care pathway and how it can help the NHS achieve wider priorities such as delivering more care in the community and reducing unwarranted variation.

Wilmington Healthcare’s Digital Learning Academy has extensive educational information and resources on the NHS Long-term Plan. To find out more, visit https://wilmingtonhealthcare.com/what-we-do/education-and-training/nhs-ltp-course/