High Quality Care for All summary and links

Lord Ara Darzi's much anticipated final report of his Next Stage Review has been published in the week of the 60th anniversary of the NHS. Innovation, quality and patients rights are the cornerstones of the review.

The key points to the review are:

• Patients to get more rights and control.
• A new single web based knowledge portal called NHS Evidence to be created.
• National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to have an expanded role to set and approve independent quality standards, and to synthesise and spread knowledge through the new knowledge portal.
• Health Innovation and Education Clusters to be established.
• Academic Health Science Centres will be fostered with no set model but criteria to be set by an expert panel.
• SHAs to have a legal duty to promote innovation.
• Healthcare providers to publish 'quality accounts'.
• Clinical leadership and workforce planning to be strengthened.
• New voluntary agreements to improve health outcomes.
• Payments to hospitals to be dependent on quality of care as well as volume.
• Quality and Outcomes Framework to provide incentives for maintaining good health.
• All PCTs are to commission wellbeing and prevention services.

Of particular interest to the HSRN:

A new single NHS Evidence knowledge portal through which anyone will be able to access clinical and non clinical evidence and best practice, describing both what high quality care looks like and how to deliver it. NICE has been tasked with managing the synthesis and spread of knowledge through the portal. The portal has real potential to help resolve one of the key problems managers have in using research evidence - knowing where to find it.

SHAs will have a legal duty to promote innovation and new regional innovation funds will be created. Funds will help identify, grow and diffuse innovation and will be supported and advised nationally by an expert panel. New prizes also are to be established. It will be interesting to see how these developments take hold and how they sit along or replace the innovation hubs currently working in this area.

Health Innovation and Education Clusters will bring together many partners, across primary, community and secondary care, universities and colleges, and industry. Their members will run joint innovation programmes that reflect their local needs and distinctiveness. They will also promote learning and education between their members and will enable research findings to be applied more readily to improve patient care. Over time, these clusters may be commissioned to provide postgraduate education and training of all healthcare professionals. It will be interesting to see how these clusters sit alongside the recently announced Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs).

Academic Health Science Centres will be fostered and no one model will be preferred. However, an expert panel will decide on the criteria for these centres and they will be expected to compete internationally. This suggests any health services research focussed centres may find it difficult to meet the criteria.

Download the NHS Confederation's full summary and its briefing on the NHS Constitution (which includes a commitment to research).

For summaries and comment from other organisations follow the links below:

Institute for Innovation and Improvement: The next leg of the journey: How do we make High Quality Care for All a reality?

King's Fund

Sainsbury Centre

BMA

RCN

The HSRN would like to hear from you if there are issues in the Review that you feel the Network should take up or would be worthwhile to explore in discussions. Contact stephan.groombridge@nhsconfed.org