FUTURE ESTATE PLANNING
Call for increased focus on primary care investment
At a ‘virtual’ meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Healthcare Infrastructure focusing on the ‘refresh’ of the Health Infrastructure Plan (HIP), four distinguished speakers considered topics including the need to invest in primary care, as well as acute hospital settings, for improved forward planning to afford the NHS greater resilience, and for enhanced healthcare infrastructure in poorer and more disadvantaged communities, ‘to reduce health inequalities’. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Speaking in the online meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on 15 March were Professor Sir Chris Ham, Co-chair of the NHS Assembly, Paul Maulbach, Chief Executive of the Black Country and West Birmingham CCG, Professor Jane Perry, Dean of Health, Sport, and Bioscience at the University of East London, and Richard Darch, CEO of Archus. Lord Bethell, who has recently been elected the Group’s Vice-Chair, introduced the speakers and chaired the webinar. Lord Bethell was appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care on 9 March 2020. He is the House of Lords Minister responsible for representing all health matters and legislation in the Upper House, and a former Minister for Technology, Innovation, and Life Sciences. The first speaker was Professor Chris
A well-attended meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Healthcare Infrastructure on 15 March saw some interesting questions from an informed audience.
Ham, Co-Chair of the NHS Assembly, Chair of the Coventry and Warwickshire Health and Care Partnership, and a non-executive director of the Royal Free London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Prof. Ham is also Emeritus Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Birmingham, Visiting Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Senior Visiting Fellow at The King’s Fund, where he was CEO between 2010 and 2018. The author of over 20 books, and numerous articles, on health policy and management, he has worked at the Universities of Leeds, Bristol,
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and Birmingham – from where he was seconded to the Department of Health as director of the Strategy Unit between 2000 and 2004.
‘A clear and loud message’ from the pandemic Prof. Sir Chris Ham began: “We have had a clear and loud message from the pandemic of the challenges facing the NHS, social care, and public health systems, in terms of the lack of capacity to respond to a national emergency on the scale of COVID-19.” He had seen this, he explained, from his national role as the Chair of an Integrated Care System, and being on the Board of the Royal Free
Prof. Sir Chris Ham: “We have had a clear and loud message from the pandemic of the challenges facing the NHS, social care, and public health systems, in terms of the lack of capacity to respond to a national emergency on the scale of COVID-19”
London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He said: “In a way, this was not a surprise, because the NHS has always run hot. We’ve had a decade or so of austerity, where growth and funding have not kept pace with the rise in demand, making the underlying shortage of capacity somewhat worse. We also know from international comparisons that for some time the UK has had fewer doctors and nurses per capita, and fewer hospital beds, than many other countries. We thus lack a buffer to respond to surges in demand of the kind that began in 2020.” Pre-pandemic, he felt the capacity
constraints in public health had not been so obvious, but it had quickly become clear, as coronavirus case numbers rose, that there was insufficient capacity both for community testing, and for contact tracing – which the Professor said he believed had been ‘woefully inadequate, until there was an investment of money and time to correct the situation’.
Future pandemic planning He said: “I hope future pandemic planning
May 2022 Health Estate Journal 51
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