Unusually, I didn’t live tweet from @MattHancock’s Future of Healthcare speech this morning. I wanted to think about the text afterwards, and the novelty of being IN A ROOM WITH PEOPLE made me want to pay real attention. A thread of my reactions. 1/11.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-future-of-healthcare
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-future-of-healthcare
2/11. This is all true but we need to acknowledge how little the system really knows about how people have experienced and are experiencing it. Nor can we make a final judgement on performance until we see the long-term impact of the needs that have been hidden and unmet.
3/11. Again, true overall. But I worry that there’s inevitably been a 4th cultural shift, away from the advances we’d just started to make and the LTP planned to take further around patient and public voice and involvement, and the true personalisation of care. Need to refocus.
4/11. I do HOPE this is a signal that we won’t have further top-down reform. But it isn’t quite ruled out. On learning from the evidence, that’ll only be effective if the evidence includes what people have experienced and where the wider needs are.
5/11. A grade-A answer here would recognise the existing and much greater potential contribution of charities (acknowledged in today’s People Plan).
6/11. Big and obvious benefits, but only if people are sharing decision-making with professionals. Otherwise it risks providing license to return to the paternalistic culture we thought we were escaping from.
7/11. Great to see this bit. The more often people at the top talk about the needs of people living with multiple conditions, the better I like it.
8/11. This enthusiasm for going further with a can-do but still safe attitude to data-sharing needs to include leadership on making it easier for charities to connect into these systems so people get a joined-up experience.
9/11. Building on joint working with local government is crucial and, yes, private sector capacity has been important (though more indisputably, I’d say, at the hospital end than in the tracing bit of test-and-trace). But hope omitting open borders with vol sector is just a slip.
10/11. Social care plans will be bold?
Talks about full range of care needs and independent living, not just care homes for older people?
But the devil will be in the detail of that comment about oversight and accountability, code for NHS/local authority demarcation?

Talks about full range of care needs and independent living, not just care homes for older people?

But the devil will be in the detail of that comment about oversight and accountability, code for NHS/local authority demarcation?
11/11. Even if it came at the end, good to see this passage on inequality accepting that there are structural issues at work. And one of my favourite Orwell quotes. Now need to follow through on the logic of this position.
@threadreaderapp unroll, please.