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Five year forward view
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The NHS Five Year Forward View was published on 23 October 2014 and sets out a vision for the future of the NHS.
The purpose is to articulate why change is needed, what that change might look like and how we can achieve it. It describes various models of care which could be provided in the future, defining the actions required at local and national level to support delivery.
It covers areas such as disease prevention; new, flexible models of service delivery tailored to local populations and needs; integration between services; and consistent leadership across the health and care system. Everyone will need to play their part – system leaders, NHS staff, patients and the public – to realise the potential benefits for all.
So, the Five Year Forward View starts the move towards a different NHS, recognising the challenges and outlining potential solutions to the big questions facing health and care services in England. It defines the framework for further detailed planning about how the NHS needs to evolve over the next five years.
Who is responsible for delivering it?
NHS England, Public Health England, Monitor, Health Education England, the Care Quality Commission and the NHS Trust Development Authority are all working together to deliver the Five Year Forward View.
Ian Cumming, HEE’s Chief Executive Officer, sits on the NHS Five Year Forward View board alongside CEOs of the NHS’s principal leadership bodies, formed to provide strategic oversight of the delivery of the Forward View and support greater alignment between the different statutory bodies at a national and local level.
HEE’s Work Advisory Board is established to understand the workforce implications of the Forward View and is addressing the key aims by ensuring the right numbers of the right workforce is provided through education and training. Included in their work is tackling the underlying cause of the growth in agency staff.
Health Education England published its Strategic Framework in July 2014 before the publication of the Forward View. Called Framework 15, it describes the future workforce characteristics needed to deliver services to patients and people (taking a 15-year view). The characteristics described support the vision outlined in the Forward View and provides the foundations on which to develop our workforce transformation priorities each year as set out in our business plan.
What’s the progress so far?
The NHS in England has committed to the biggest transformation of mental health care across the NHS in a generation, pledging to help more than a million extra people and investing more than a billion pounds a year by 2020/21. The move is in response to the final report of an independent taskforce, chaired by the Chief Executive of Mind Paul Farmer, set up by the NHS as part of its Five Year Forward View to build consensus on how to improve services for people of all ages.
The taskforce gives a frank assessment of the state of current mental health care across the NHS, highlighting that one in four people will experience a mental health problem in their lifetime and the cost of mental ill health to the economy, NHS and society is £105bn a year.
In a wide ranging package of recommendations, it proposes a three-pronged approach to improving care through prevention, the expansion of mental health care such as seven day access in a crisis, and integrated physical and mental health care. The taskforce suggests, and the NHS accepts, investing over £1bn a year of additional funding in NHS care by 2020/21 to reach one million more people - this investment is in addition to the previously announced new funding for children, young people and perinatal care.
Five Year Forward View Time to Deliver, published in June, outlined the progress to date and how the partners would play their part in delivering the changes.
As part of this progress, some 269 local areas came forward with their ideas on how to design new models of care and following a process of peer assessment, 50 Vanguards were selected. This leading edge of NHS organisations and Local Authorities will improve care for over five million patients, as well as help us identify and solve problems in a way that can be replicated more widely across the NHS.
Workforce issues are central to all Vanguards, as organisations do not deliver care to patients: people do. HEE is working with Vanguards to support the development of the new workforce needed to deliver the new care models in key areas:
Workforce redesign/transformation – identifying and working with sites on developing the working in order for vanguards to deliver
Supporting innovation – working with vanguards on workforce needs to bring about innovation
Solving problems through joint leadership – leading and/or working in partnership to overcome the workforce challenges identified by vanguards
Building local capacity – including leadership development, and providing tools and support for local workforce planning.
You can keep up to date on progress of the Forward View by returning to this page or by searching for #FutureNHS on Twitter.