Give every NHS hospital patient a single consultant, says Jeremy Hunt

An NHS culture change will indicate an end to the ‘brief encounters’ with consultants many patients experience. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Individuals in hospital ought to be place underneath the charge of a single advisor accountable for all the care they acquire, whose identify will have to be prominently displayed to ensure sick individuals have an “advocate” whilst currently being treated, the well being secretary will announce on Thursday.

In his initial speech of the yr Jeremy Hunt will phone for a culture alter in NHS hospitals which doctors have told him now deliver patient care in “a series of brief encounters”.

Hunt will say that he has been contacted by patients who advised him of a series of health care mistakes triggered “by bad continuity of care, by a method the place no one took accountability for sorting out the dilemma or looking after the particular person rather than just a component of the entire body in which issues had gone incorrect”.

The wellness secretary’s biggest alter will be the creation of US-fashion “hospitalist” medical professionals in the NHS. These are physicians, whom Hunt calls “entire-remain physicians”, who will not practise classic medication but rather are accessible most of the day in the hospital to meet family members and are able to stick to up exams, answer nurses’ concerns, and assure that care is going in accordance to program.

They would also liaise with a loved ones doctor to ensure the patient was discharged in a “suitable handover to a named, accountable GP”.

Hunt will inform an audience at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital that this method proved “highly productive in nations the place adopted”.

He will say: “Lengthy stays and expenses can be lowered – for instance, a recent study hunting nationally across the US showed the presence of hospitalists was related with reduced probability of readmission for heart failure, acute myocardial infarction and pneumonia.”

Drawing on the “#hellomynameis” blogging-run campaign of Kate Granger, a physician who is terminally sick, Hunt will say that the move is in element inspired by the “important courtesy of introducing your self when meeting a patient for the 1st time”.

Those “accountable” doctors would have their names put above the beds of individuals, “a practice that began becoming discouraged a decade ago as a throwback to the past”.

Today fewer than 40% of hospitals have advisor names above beds but the Care High quality Commission, the NHS regulator, would make this one of the approaches of judging how nicely a believe in cared for its sufferers, he said.

While cautious to praise the NHS as the “nation’s greatest treasure”, Hunt will say that the well being support can, as the Francis report into patient care concluded, turn into “focused on performing the system’s company – not that of the individuals”.

The wellness secretary will add that a lack of compassion is not the concern. It is about “obtaining the proper culture [by] reasserting a easy reality: every single patient is a particular person”.

He says: “A particular person with a identify. A individual with a household. Not just a physique harbouring a pathology, not a diagnostic puzzle, not a 4-hour target or an 18-week issue, not a value stress – and most definitely not ‘bed-blocker’.”

To guarantee sufferers are not shunted about the hospital to meet anonymous clinicians, Hunt says he will also minimize the quantity of ward transfers throughout a single hospital stay, speed up the introduction of seven-day operating in the NHS and look at what he calls “rigid shift patterns imposed in part as a response to the European working time directive”.

Some of the measures will please sections of the health care neighborhood. Norman Williams, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, whom the government commissioned to examine the affect of the operating-time directive on the NHS, welcomed the “determination to deliver back a much more streamlined and compassionate approach to care”.

He mentioned: “The progressive fragmentation of care that we have observed in the NHS is not only complicated and damaging for individuals but also undermines the professionalism of health-related teams.”

In response to Hunt’s speech, Paul Flynn, chair of the BMA’s consultants committee, said that even though they supported the notion that “a lot more 7-day services [must be] available … delivering much more urgent and emergency care should be the priority”.

He added: “Perform patterns must market and help continuity of patient care and exactly where opportunities lie for improvement these need to be explored. It is vital, nevertheless, that working patterns also safeguard the want for a wholesome and productive work-existence stability for medical professionals, as that is also critical to guarding patient safety and care.”

Give every NHS hospital patient a single consultant, says Jeremy Hunt