Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting delivered a speech at the Royal College of General Practitioners last week, emphasising the role of technology in rebuilding and reforming general practice and emphasising data as “the future of the NHS”.
Highlighting the findings of the Darzi investigation that “GPs are expected to manage increasingly complex care, but do not have the resources, infrastructure and authority that this requires”, Streeting shared that the Department of Health and Social Care will soon be undertaking a “wide-ranging and deep engagement exercise” designed to help build a 10-year plan for the NHS. As previously indicated, the plan will focus on three “big shifts”: moving focus from analogue to digital, from hospital to community, and from sickness to prevention.
General practice is “fundamental” to each of these priorities, Streeting emphasised, noting examples shared by GPs at the conference including the use of technology to meet demand for same-day appointments and to provide a digital front door, and advancements in big data which Streeting expects to “transform the NHS’s ability to end the cruel postcode lottery of health inequality”. In particular, he pointed to an example of a GP taking screening, checks and care directly to the communities found through data analysis to be most in need as an example of this in practice.
Streeting stressed the need to “work together to create a single patient record, owned by the patient, shared across the system so that every part of the NHS has a full picture of the patient”, and acknowledged that whilst studies such as the UK Biobank are building detailed profiles of the nation’s health, “we still see, far too often, that this data is not shared according to patients’ wishes.”
As such, Streeting stated that he is directing NHS England to remove this burden from general practice. If a patient explicitly consents to sharing their data with a study, NHS England is to take responsibility for making this happen, and demand the “highest standards” of data security.
He shared concerns that this is not only an issue of information governance, but of culture, and added that unless addressed cultural challenges around data carry the risk of “not only [exacerbating] the shortcomings of the system today, but also [squandering] the potential of tomorrow”. There is a need to embrace the potential of genomics, AI and machine learning, he continued, and to carry a collectivist ethos to support data in improving healthcare for all.
“In this century, our data will be as valuable as our taxes: we contribute our data in the knowledge that it will lead to more personalised medicine, but also because it will contribute to better care for everyone,” Streeting concluded.
The Royal College of General Practitioners responded to Streeting’s speech by backing calls to free up GP time to enable more time to be spent with patients, pointing in particular to the need to reduce “unnecessary workload and bureaucracy” for GPs.
Primary care in the spotlight
This week HTN explored the most recent board papers from NHS England, which saw the board share insight on the launch of the Health Insight Survey which will aim to provide insight into patient experience on GP access, dentistry, community pharmacy and the elective waiting list.
In September, we looked into details for the primary care implementation of the NHS patient safety strategy, noting the role of digital and data in areas such as automatically flagging patient safety issues to support reliability, and supporting clinical decision-making by digitally embedding diagnosis advice and safety netting.
HTN has also hosted two panel discussions exploring the role of digital and tech in this space over the past few months – we explored innovation in primary care here, and the landscape of digital primary care here.
