New Welsh care plan pledges care closer to home

Wales’ primary care services will be enhanced so the vast majority of NHS care is planned and provided in the community, closer to people’s homes, under a new four-year plan unveiled today by the Welsh Government.

The plan, which was launched by Deputy Health Minister Vaughan Gething (pictured) during a visit to a primary care resource centre in Blaenavon, will develop primary care services in Wales by including all those organisations and services in communities which can help to improve the quality of care at or as close to home as possible.

It will be backed by a new £10m Welsh Government primary care fund – three times the size of the £3.5m investment in primary care this autumn, which is tackling heart disease risk in deprived communities, training an expanded primary care workforce and delivering more eye care closer to home rather than in hospitals.

Mr Gething said: “Our new four-year plan will help secure and improve primary care services across Wales, ensuring they are the engine room of the Welsh NHS.

“Our aim is to improve access to and the quality of primary care, enabling more people to be treated and cared for closer to their homes; helping people to look after themselves and ultimately avoiding inappropriate and unnecessary hospital admissions wherever and whenever possible.

“Primary care is where we can make the biggest impact in tackling the major health challenges we face as a nation.”  

The first point of contact for people is usually the GP, whose team is responsible for as much as 90% of patient care. General practice is, and will remain at the heart of primary care.

Under the new proposals, a primary care service for Wales based on the principles of prudent healthcare, will become the mainstay of the NHS – tackling the root causes of ill health; preventing people from being admitted to hospital unnecessarily; helping people who have been admitted to hospital to get home quickly with the right support and motivating and supporting people with chronic conditions and long-term illnesses to manage their health at home.

The new primary care service for Wales will help to reshape the NHS in Wales, developing and widening the primary care workforce, to provide the majority of care close to people’s homes. This means that, over time, there will be a transfer of resources from hospitals to the community. A wider range of health professionals will work together in local integrated health and social care teams to provide easy-to-access care to patients and also support people to look after themselves.

Under the plan:

• Healthcare will be planned and delivered locally – assessment, treatment and ongoing care will be available in or as close to people’s homes as possible with rapid and more local access to more specialist clinical advice;
• Access to services will be improved – more use of modern technology and better information, advice and assistance to support effective self care and care from a wide range of the right professionals, including pharmacists and nurses, on the same day, either face-to-face, on the phone, by e-mail, instant/video messaging;
• Quality of services will be improved – to support improved health and self care, there will be more co-production of care, more integrated teams of health and social care professionals working around the person, who are trained to provide a wider range of more personalised care, acting on feedback on patient experience and peer review;
• Equitable access – tackling the effects of poverty by planning and delivering care which is proportionate to need to reduce the gap in health outcomes – such as low birth weight and life expectancy – between our most and least deprived communities, as well as increasing access to care in the Welsh language;
• A skilled local workforce – the development of a national plan for the development of a re-modelled primary care workforce working together to deliver care based on an understanding of need and the numbers and mix of skills needed;  
• Strong leadership – a national once-for-Wales programme of work to support local action and a national professional lead for primary care will be appointed.