The Access to Care programme has a vision to ensure that our population are able to access the care they need in the place that is the most appropriate to deliver it and our 3 key priorities are:
- Improving access to health and care for the communities we serve
- Removing the barriers that create inequalities to accessing care
- Ensuring our people receive the right care in the right place first time
These priorities span across our programmes which are:
- Urgent Care
- Elective Care and Recovery
- Cancer
- Specialty projects: MSK and Paediatrics
Within these there are a number of distinct projects. Some of these are nationally driven such as the urgent care priorities or the community diagnostic hubs, whereas some are more local supporting young people with a long-term condition to discuss their worries and anxieties with our Healthy Minds Apprentices or our clinical colleagues developing new electronic pathways of care to ensure that when a GP diagnoses someone, they have the most up to date clinical information about our specialties to avoid people being delayed in seeing the right person for their condition.
If we deliver on our priorities, we would expect to see people being able to access the care they need either in their local communities or through online options, being supported to “wait well” with health and wellbeing resources as they await clinical procedures or operations, and being able to navigate the health system to see the right person for their need first time.