A key aspect of Lord Darzi’s approach was to put clinical leaders right at the heart of the review and here in the West Midlands almost 200 frontline clinical and social care staff have already helped to develop regional plans for improving services.
As experts in their fields, the clinical and social care leads will be taking forward the recommendations from these plans, in different health scenarios ranging from maternity and child health to acute care, mental health, long term conditions and end of life care.
Investing for Health: Delivering our clinical vision for a world class health service has three main aims:
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Making quality the driving concern of all that we do; quality of outcome, quality and safety of care, and quality of patient experience
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Action to do more to prevent ill health and to intervene early in the course of illness
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To narrow the gap between those with the best health and those with the worst, whilst increasing the average overall
Working with staff and organisations across the West Midlands, in addition to linking with other clinicians and social care staff across the country, the leads will:
- Champion the clinical pathways developed as part of the Darzi review
- Monitor the care across the region to ensure it is of consistent high quality
- Identify, celebrate and share best practice
- Work as a team, identifying opportunities to improve services
- Help organisations understand how they are doing in each of the pathway areas by encouraging them to review each others’ work
- Help to develop the ways in which education, training and development are commissioned for the NHS workforce
One of the key ways of achieving these objectives will be to ensure that the regional Clinical Pathway Groups’ recommendations are implemented across the NHS in the West Midlands. The West Midlands Clinical and Social Care Leads are working one day a week in this new role. Further appointments will be made for Diagnostics in the next few weeks.