Our response to the White Paper
We welcome the recognition of the importance of Academic Health Sciences
Centres (AHSC) in the White Paper. Following a meeting of the five AHSCs with
Earl Howe we have contributed to a combined AHSC response that will be
sent separately. The purpose of this response is to highlight some of
the distinctive features and concerns of King’s Health Partners, an
association between Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital, South
London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts and King’s College
London.
Public Health
We welcome the central role afforded to public health at the heart of
government policy on health. We believe that to fulfil the expectations
set, public health needs to be transformed and to recast its scope
beyond its existing limitations. It should embrace the potential of
personalised medicine and modern genomics and the science of behavioural
change to exploit the potential for “personalised interventions”, i.e.
individualised risk screening and care, giving patients better
information about the risks and choices they face, and the
responsibilities they can exercise in securing their own health. This
will require a fundamental rethinking of traditional professional
attitudes to public health, and the principles of personalised medicine,
prevention, early intervention and recovery to be established as
central to every clinical discipline. We call this ‘The New Public
Health’. The strong links to commissioning though should be preserved,
creating integrated systems in which care pathways are commissioned.
Provider Networks
We see AHSCs playing a critical role as the hubs of provider networks.
Within King’s Health Partners, all three Foundation Trusts are providing
specialised and highly specialised services, receiving patients from
across the country. We wish to work with commissioners to ensure
specialist care is provided in a consistent way and believe that the
AHSC can support this integration. At a national level we are keen to
support the work of the National Commissioning Board and would like to
offer the expertise of our clinicians to contribute to the development
of this.
Patients
We strongly support the approach in the White Paper to further
empowering patients, and in particular we endorse the significance of
the proposals to involve patients more in their own care record and
thereby to engage them more in their own care. We are working on
examples of this in practice, linked to our desire to engage patients
more in research activities, and to give them more scope to be involved
in understanding the results of their own care and treatment and the
progress of biomedical science in relation to their needs. We would be
keen to contribute our experience to the development of this work
nationally.
Integrated Care
AHSCs are well placed to develop new models of integrated care with
King’s Health Partners providing both the highly specialised acute care
described above and now preparing to incorporate local Community
services. This provides a real opportunity to co-design models with GP
commissioners, other commissioners and patients. Models that create
payment systems providing the right incentives to break down barriers
between multiple providers, will be piloted and tested, with the
expectation that efficiencies and improved patient experience can be
delivered.
Integration of mental and physical healthcare
King’s Health Partners has identified this challenge as a key public
health issue which we have the unique opportunity to tackle through the
make up of the partnership, encompassing acute and mental health
Foundation Trusts and an academic partner with marked strength in both
domains. Psychological morbidity in patients with physical illness, and
physical morbidity in patients with mental illness, are substantial
issues that are not effectively addressed in the current system. This is
something that we aim to address.
Research
One of the central goals of AHSCs is to integrate research more
effectively with clinical care, and AHSC accreditation brings a clear
opportunity to build on and consolidate the success to date of the NIHR
Biomedical Research Centres. The ongoing funding of these will bring an
opportunity to transform clinical care through the measurable impact of
these biomedical developments. Within King’s Health Partners we have
identified 4 key areas to ensure ongoing development of this work,
bringing a variety of disciplines to bear on improved patient care.
These key areas are:
- Drug Development – considered from the perspective of experimental medicine all the way to late phase trials
- Informatics – clinical informatics, bioinformatics and biostatistics and the major opportunities offered by increasingly complex datasets
- Personalised Medicine – biomarkers and genomics in stratified medicine in clinical trials, individualised therapies and early intervention
- Primary Care Prevention and Public Health - as referenced above, this is at the forefront of the King’s Health Partners strategic vision.
We see the provision of high quality education as a core requirement in delivering increasingly complex health care in the 21st century with the right professionals, with the right skills and training in place to deliver care in a compassionate and confident way at the right point in the patient pathway. We would reference the early successes of the King’s Health Partners Education Academy in integrating all the health education that the Partners undertake. The South London HIEC, led from King’s Health Partners, is also proving highly successful in disseminating novel education and training methods throughout a wider network, creating the opportunity to tailor the workforce more nimbly to meet the needs of remodelled patient pathways.
In summary, we wish to work with our many partners to support the ambition of the White Paper, delivering greater integration of community based and hospital based healthcare, greater integration of research with clinical care in order to achieve internationally benchmarked excellence in outcomes, more locally rooted education and training, and a more empowered patient population exercising responsibility for their own health.
Download a pdf version of our response
Download a pdf version of our collective AHSC response
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