As the health service grapples with the need to provide quality care while containing spiralling patient care costs (something all stakeholders will need to do for decades to come), the ability to manage care in a holistic, safe and cost effective way is a priority for commissioners.
Choosing the best healthcare partner to deliver these often complex and detailed healthcare requirements is high on the agenda for many commissioners and with the recent changes to NHS commissioning and the publication of the Homecare Medicines Review guidelines, this task has become even more important to get right first time round.
So what can you do to ensure the right partnerships are formed that best meet your individual service objective needs?
First of all, the healthcare partner should offer a broad and integrated range of services such as medicines distribution/logistics, clinical homecare, medicines support, dispensing services, medicine preparation and clinical trial support. Not only does provision of these cohesive services avoid the need for other external partners and contracts, but it also creates the flexibility to add-on future services as end-to-end patient healthcare needs develop and expand.
In addition, this fully integrated approach has a greater potential to lead to service efficiencies, flexible service delivery and improved patient care. ..
The healthcare partner must help patients make better use of the medicines and therapies they are prescribed and by doing so, the NHS can be supported to deliver the demands of the Government's QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) agenda ..
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Most importantly, a partner should be able to demonstrate a strong track record of patient-centric care that supports patients throughout their care journey...
An aspect which is perhaps given less weight is the existence of shared values and complementary multi-disciplinary expertise between stakeholder organisations. In my opinion, evidence of this is critical to engender mutual trust and respect between both organisations, as no doubt the ability for co-operative working will be tested under the current challenging and changing healthcare environment.
Ultimately, the true measure of success will be the strength of the relationship between the healthcare provider and partner as they work together in the pursuit of mutual goals to deliver the best possible care for their patients.
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rob halkes