What does this mean for libraries?
Increases in demand from students, such as nursing students on placement in NHS organisations, and increases in medical student numbers will have an impact on the workload of LKS, and may require the introduction of new services to support them, such as having access to good WiFi or lockers, and more collaboration with university library services.
A move towards more Integrated Care Systems, and potentially more collaborative working under the auspices of Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) could have implications for LKS that have SLAs with only some local organisations, and more work may need to be done to encourage organisations that currently don’t contribute to LKS to do so, so that all staff in an area have equitable funded access.
LKS are ideally placed to help get better value for the NHS and get the most out of the investment in it by making the evidence base accessible and encouraging its use and application. It could be a good opportunity to promote time saving services such as current awareness and mediated evidence searches. LKS can also support innovation and change through encouraging and supporting knowledge management.
There may be a need to help NHS staff become more familiar with digital systems, particularly to help retain staff that are less confident with IT. While some areas are more difficult for LKS to provide training in (such as patient records) there may be areas that we can help with, such as helping staff become familiar with mobile devices and the use of apps.
With the focus on preventing illness, LKS will have a role to play in supporting the provision of good-quality health information for patient and carers.
Katie Nicholas of Health Education England has prepared a useful summary of references to evidence, knowledge, innovation and Topol in the NHS Long Term Plan.
Source: NHS England
Date of publication: January 2019
Summary of driver:
This is the first stage in planning for the next ten years of the NHS in England. Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) will have until the autumn to say how they are going to implement the plan locally.
It is said to be ambitious but realistic.
There are three main areas of health and care this plan aims to tackle:
- Making sure everyone gets the best start in life
This includes taking further action on childhood obesity, increasing funding for children and young people’s mental health, reducing stillbirths and mother and child deaths during birth by 50% and delivering the best treatments available for children with cancer, including CAR-T and proton beam therapy.
- Delivering world-class care for major health problems (both physical and mental)
This includes preventing 150,000 heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases, spending at least £2.3bn more a year on mental health care, delivering community-based physical and mental care for 370,000 people with severe mental illness a year by 2023/24, and saving 55,000 more lives a year by diagnosing more cancers early.
- Supporting people to age well
This includes increasing funding for primary and community care by at least £4.5bn, bringing together different professionals to coordinate care better, developing more rapid community response teams to prevent unnecessary hospital spells, and speed up discharges home and upgrading NHS staff support to people living in care homes.
The planned means to do this include:
- Doing things differently
This includes encouraging more collaboration between GPs, their teams and community services, as ‘primary care networks’, to increase the services they can provide jointly, and increase the focus on NHS organisations working with their local partners, as ‘Integrated Care Systems’, to plan and deliver services which meet the needs of their communities.
- Preventing illness and tackling health inequalities
This will include action on helping people stop smoking, overcome drinking problems and avoid Type 2 diabetes.
- Backing our workforce
There are planned thousands more clinical placements for undergraduate nurses, hundreds more medical school places, and more routes into the NHS such as apprenticeships. There will also be work to improve staff retention.
- Making better use of data and digital technology
Among other plans, there will be a new NHS App, better access to digital tools and patient records for staff.
- Getting the most out of taxpayers’ investment in the NHS
Identifying ways to reduce duplication in how clinical services are delivered, and make better use of the NHS’ combined buying power to get commonly-used products for cheaper, and reduce spend on administration.
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