'GHOST TOWN BRITAIN' COSTING NHS £8.4 BILLION A YEAR

NHS IGNORING ITS MOST VALUABLE ASSETS - PATIENTS AND FRONTLINE STAFF

The National Health Service is wasting up to £8.4 billion a year by ignoring the potential of its most valuable assets, says a new report from nef.

Towards an Asset-based NHS says that experience in the UK shows neighbourhoods are the critical factor that is missing from both the public health debate and from NHS strategy. The loss of communities' services and involvement in public life is part of a wider phenomenon that nef has described as the rise of "Ghost Town Britain".

As Secretary of State for Health, John Reid MP, prepares to conduct another consultation on public health, the report recommends an 'asset based' approach which gives more responsibility to frontline staff, patients and their neighbours in the local community.

Current health policies misunderstand the potential of patient involvement, says the report. The Government is struggling to put a few professional representatives on powerless local boards, but ignoring the vital importance of a supportive neighbourhood if people are going to be healed and stay well.

As a result, re-admission rates to hospital are far too high, and powerful means of tackling chronic problems like long-term depression and loneliness are ignored - with serious cost implications.

The report proposes new systems of partnership between doctors, patients and neighbours that are capable of 'co-producing' health - using the pioneering experience of time banks and other forms of co-production in health in the UK and USA.

These allow patients to become partners in delivering health, by helping with small DIY repairs, visiting, befriending, phone support, checking on hospital discharges and other small tasks that are vital for the efficiency of the NHS, but which are better provided by neighbours than by professionals.  The report also calls for:

• A 'co-production' strategy that can measure and reward, and therefore tap into, the enormous resources of patient's time

• Devolution of initiative to frontline staff and an end to the target culture.

• A requirement that all health institutions have a strategy to involve patients as partners with professionals in the business of delivering health.

• Research into new public health solutions that are more effective than 'education' campaigns and threatening people with serious disincentives.

"The asset-based approach is the key to making the NHS's vast resources start to work," says Sarah Burns, head of nef's public services programme. "Without a partnership in the actual delivery of services - which can transform people's condition just by the fact of involving them, as well as the support they receive - people have no meaningful stake in the NHS.  Having a handful of local representatives on powerless boards is neither really participative nor likely to start to shift NHS fortunes"

"It is time that the Government realised there is more to public health than threats and scare tactics"

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	Publications Towards an Asset Based NHS

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	Sarah Burns