Kate Woodhead RGN DMS discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with the vision of moving healthcare away from hospitals and into the community. She highlights some of the schemes that are already in place and outlines some of the main considerations.
Successive governments have made promises to move more care away from the acute sector and into the community. However, this major change has not materialised, to date. Not only has the promise been repeatedly broken but, worse still, more funds have been channelled into hospital care away from community and primary care.
Much has been written about the issues in the NHS, many are focused on hospital care and not just on the struggles in general practice. The great sadness of this whole issue is that demographic change has been coming for a long while and nothing has been done politically to ensure that the roof is fixed, while the sun shines. Into the complex picture, much of the acute sector has lost many acute beds in the last twenty years — leading to the current ignominious shame of corridor care.
The King's Fund describes different sets of assumptions1 about the purpose of moving care closer to communities and states that these include:
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