Well being services facing largest challenge in its historical past, new NHS chief says

Simon Stevens: ‘Service pressures are intensifying and longstanding problems are not going to disappear overnight.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

The NHS is dealing with the most significant challenge in its 66-yr history and need to radically adjust how it cares for sufferers in buy to cope with intensifying pressures, the service’s new boss has warned.

A budget squeeze combined with a expanding demand for care driven by the ageing population indicates that “for the NHS the stakes have never been greater”, Simon Stevens will say on Tuesday – his very first day as NHS England’s chief executive.

He will use a speech in Newcastle to mix praise for the NHS he has inherited with a clarion contact to its one.three million employees to embrace main adjustments to their roles above the subsequent few years in order to improve the good quality of care individuals get.

“I know that for the NHS the stakes have in no way been larger. Service pressures are intensifying and longstanding troubles are not going to disappear overnight,” Stevens will say. “Efficiently navigating the next couple of years is going to get a crew effort, involving the most significant team in the greatest effort the NHS has ever seen.”

In his 1st public statement Stevens will identify improved care of older men and women, greater joint functioning amongst the well being and social care providers and new designs of care, which harness advances in medicine as currently being between his essential priorities.

An NHS dealing with new challenges will want to find new solutions to remain sustainable, he says. “An ageing population with much more continual wellness circumstances, but with new options to live as independently as possible, indicates we’re going to have to radically transform how care is delivered outside hospitals,” he will include.

Stevens, 47, will also plead with the several different kinds of personnel who function for the NHS to move beyond divisions and work much more closely. “Our traditional partitioning of overall health providers – GPs, hospital outpatients, A&ampE departments, community nurses, emergency psychological health care, out-of-hours units, ambulance services and so on – no longer can make a lot sense”, he will say.

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Healthcare Association, mentioned that Stevens – a well being adviser to Tony Blair’s government from 1997 to 2004 – is arriving when “the NHS is facing a excellent storm of growing demand, funding pressures and worryingly minimal employees morale”.

Each he and Andy Burnham, the shadow overall health secretary, cautioned that Stevens would have to confront issues produced by the coalition’s shake-up of the NHS in England last year, particularly involving competitors.

With the service even now digesting the lessons of the Mid Staffs scandal, Stevens will acknowledge that, although “the high quality of NHS care is generally really higher, occasionally it isn’t”. He will also laud the essential function of whistleblowers in exposing poor care and warn that “an NHS with a ‘like it or lump it’ attitude will merely not survive”.

Well being services facing largest challenge in its historical past, new NHS chief says