Health Department to establish neighbourhood system of care
The reset plan sets out measures to counter unprecedented financial pressures, with a projected £600m gap between available funding and the cost of maintaining existing services this year.It is designed to achieve £300m in savings in 2025/26, in addition to the £200m delivered in 2024/25.
The health minister said the programme will involve a suite of actions focused on improving Trust financial controls, reducing locum and agency costs, increasing workforce availability through absence reduction, removing unwarranted variation in clinical care and procurement, optimising medicines spend, reducing central budgets and administrative costs and maximising the income the HSC can attract through research and innovation.Mike Nesbitt said he was not prepared to "face an ever-increasing gap between what our system costs and the funding we have available, resulting in continuing decline in our services, longer waiting lists, poorer outcomes, and an increasingly frustrated and demoralised workforce".He said it makes it "all the more critical" that there is focus on resetting the Health and Social Care system to deliver stabilisation, reform and delivery.
The plan is focused on seven key areasPrevention and seeing the citizen as an asset in that taskInvesting in Primary Care, Community Care and Social Care; delivering mental, physical and social healthcare in a joined-up wayBeing as effective and efficient as we can with the resources we haveAdopting a whole systems approach; to optimise the whole of NI's health and care workforce and estate, and to reduce the level of unwarranted clinical variationMaximising digital investment and the strategic use of dataExploiting opportunities for research, supporting early adoption of new medical procedures and treatments; with the opportunity to attract the inward investment this bringsCreating the system and structure that supports collaborative working and decision making
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