At the organisation’s first national Stakeholder Conference in November 2005, NHS Direct’s medical director, Dr Mike Sadler, set out to delegates ways in which the organisation can use its skills, infrastructure and capacity to work with the rest of the health service in responding to the challenges of better information, better access to services and better co-ordination of those services – posed by the forthcoming White Paper on hospital care.
Dr Sadler stated: “Our national infrastructure enables us to provide 24 hour access to highly skilled clinicians, across a range of health information channels, for an annual cost of around £2.40 per person. We believe that we can do even more to benefit the public, which is the basis for our detailed submission to the Department of Health.”
Some of the innovative developments proposed by NHS Direct include an interactive social care forum on the organisation’s website, enabling users to learn from each other, and bringing social and health care closer together. NHS Direct also proposed a standard system for assessing and prioritising patients who contact unscheduled care. This will simplify the patient journey, enabling consistent high quality wherever patients access unscheduled care.
Linking Choose and Book to NHS Direct services could enable patients to receive information and advice about their condition and treatment prior to booking an appointment of their choice, and even receiving the pre-hospital assessment and follow-up via the telephone.
