Big Health and Care Conversation: The Big STP Conversation
Date: Thursday 30th November 2017
Time: 1.30 – 3.30pm
The Brighthelm Centre, North Road, Brighton
Meeting organised by Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group to bring people up to date with the latest developments for the Sussex and East Surrey Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) around how the NHS and social care will work together to improve and join – up services to meet the changing needs of all of the people who live in our area.
About the STPs
The 44 Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) are required to deliver a £22bn reduction in the NHS annual budget by 2020/21 – even though the UK already spends significantly less on healthcare than comparable countries like France or Germany.
The Sustainability and Transformation Plans have been drafted in secret. They lack public support or any firm clinical evidence base. The swingeing cuts will be achieved through ‘new models of care’ that involve:
- closure of A&Es, beds, hospitals and local services despite lack of capacity
- rapid and unprecedented sell-off of NHS sites to plug funding gaps (as set out in the Naylor Review), resulting in lengthy, inconvenient and potentially unsafe journeys for patients and relatives and loss of sites for new NHS provision
- downgrading professional staff: replacing qualified doctors with 2-year trained Physician Associates; replacing nurses and other professional staff with unqualified care assistants,
- ‘care nearer home’ meaning impossible new demands on social care services that are already stretched to breaking point and family carers (predominantly women) caring for very sick people at home
- appointments conducted via Skype despite known difficulties this will create for many older and vulnerable patients
- health apps and remote monitoring used as a replacement for face-to-face engagement
The STPs, which have no statutory legal basis, are being imposed primarily as cost-cutting measures, in the absence of any reliable evidence-base to support clinical effectiveness, and without consultation with clinicians or with patients or local communities to determine acceptability. This devastating STP programme flies in the face of the NHS’ proud tradition of evidence-based medicine to meet patients’ needs.
The latest phase of the programme is the creation of ‘Accountable Care Systems’, modelled on the US healthcare market, and we believe this is the intended future for the NHS.