Background

The 'Our NHS, our future' Review was announced by the Secretary of State for Health, Rt.Hon.Alan Johnson MP in July 2007. The Review is aimed at building on existing good practice and to be a catalyst for the implementation of good ideas.

It is not intended to be about top down organisational restructuring but is to focus on delivering the best services for patients and to create organisational stability to do this. It seeks to address four critical challenges:

  • Working with NHS staff to ensure that clinical decision-making is at the heart of the future of the NHS and the pattern of service delivery
  • Improving patient care, including high-quality, joined-up services for those suffering long-term or life-threatening conditions, and ensuring patients are treated with dignity in safe, clean environments
  • Delivering more accessible and more convenient care integrated across primary and secondary providers, reflecting best value for money and offering services in the most appropriate settings for patients
  • In time for the 60th anniversary of the NHS, establishing a vision for the next decade of the health service which is based less on central direction and more on patient control, choice and local accountability and which ensures services are responsive to patients and local communities

The Review will make recommendations to the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Health and Chancellor on how the NHS can best meet these challenges whilst delivering a publicly funded, comprehensive, affordable, high-quality service on the basis of need and not ability to pay. It will report by June 2008; an Interim Report was published in October 2007.

The Interim Report usefully highlighted four broad factors which could improve the service, namely:
  • Access
  • Dignity and the patient as a person
  • Integrating care/partnership
  • Choice and personal control

These four factors are an inherent to the nature and role of physiotherapy (and other Allied Health Professionals - AHPs). The profession should take the opportunity of the Review to impress upon Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham and his team the major contribution physiotherapy and AHPs could make to delivering health and social care aspirations they have identified. These focus on 8 key areas of service:

  • Maternity and newborn care
  • Staying healthy
  • Children's health
  • Planned care
  • Acute care
  • Mental health
  • Long term conditions
  • End of life care
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This text on this page was last updated on 23 Nov 2007.