Does the autumn budget deliver cause for optimism?

After months of fevered speculation around potential tax rises and challenges for public services, the autumn budget has finally been delivered.?

And it did deliver, with ￡22.6 billion in additional NHS funding and a ￡3.1 billion increase in NHS capital investment this year and next. Plus an additional ￡1.3 billion in new core funding for councils including ￡600m for adult social care.

What the autumn budget does not set out is how to deliver a new and sustainable model of health and care for the future.?For the model of care being delivered today has not, in many ways substantially changed in over 70 years.?

With rising demand, co-morbidity and an aging population neither new hospital buildings nor substantial day-to-day revenue increases will address this on their own.

Those of us in the health and care sector know that the real test will come in the spring.?

Then the much-anticipated 10-Year Plan needs to set out both the long term investment to be offered as well as, crucially, how the model of health and care will change to truly transform the health and care sector across the UK. It is the government’s opportunity to transform the experience of both the workforce in those sectors and the citizens that hold the NHS so dear to their heart.?

The good news is that new models of care are here already. From virtual wards caring for thousands of patients at home rather than in hospital beds to technology enabled care helping people to live more independently, reducing the need for traditional care support.?

Yet today we have a complex, fragmented set of differing providers, often delivering care in isolation from each other due to disparate digital or analogue tools. The reality is that there is no unified National Health Service across the UK. And so part of the spring plan needs to centre around what we actually mean by “the NHS”.?

The opportunity is there to establish the digital infrastructure that delivers truly preventative care across the whole health and care system. There needs to be real ambition to use digital technology to create genuinely integrated models of proactive and preventative care and support.

The autumn budget’s investment today is welcome but in the spring the focus has to be on putting digital first.?

Digital is recognised as the?core way we transform the health and care offered tomorrow “from analogue to digital, from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention”.?

This needs to be coordinated, at scale and with the understanding that the experience of “the NHS” will be a very different experience for citizens in the future. That’s how the NHS will continue to be sustainable for the next 70 years and beyond.

Our work over the last 15 years gives us great optimism that true digital transformation at scale is the key to rising to this challenge. We will be publishing our own view on how this future could look.?

We'd love to hear your thoughts and causes for optimism so please reach out as we do so.

Leo Jones, CEO, Channel 3 Consulting

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