The West Midlands NHS hub being haled a ‘model for the country’

Richard Meddings, chair of NHS England, was in the Midlands this week talking to NHS staff as part of work on the 10 Year Plan and the future of health services in the UK.

And part of this included a visit to East Birmingham Locality Hub, based at Washwood Heath Health and Wellbeing Centre, Clodeshall Road, Saltley.

The Hub is part of Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System’s Community Care Collaborative and offers a range of services, including the recently unveiled Respiratory Same Day Emergency Care unit.

Mr Meddings said: “There is a really good argument this is the model for the future.

“It uses data really well, it combines data about the patients, it connects various parts of the health centre together to wrap care around the patient and it essentially helps us to shift our resources to focus around the patient and the NHS and to get more of our resources into primary and community and then partner with social care and others.

“At NHSE level , we’ve been running pilot studies for a while now looking around models of primary care.

“Primary care is the essential foundation for the good running of the NHS. It looks after more than 90 per cent of health presentations.

“But also how we think looking after our frail and our often elderly and complex patients.

“Compared with the percentage they represent of the population, the percentage of the resources they use are significantly greater.

“How can we treat them more proactively and them treat once for all of their different conditions rather than have them turn up several times and we have treat them reactively for many different conditions?

“Looking at a model which wraps care around all patients but actually profiled on high utilised patients where they have several things wrong with them and where we deal with them once has massive benefits for freeing up resources within the NHS overall.

“We can then reallocate those resources into areas of next need.

“Washwood Health Centre is the best model I’ve seen of integrated care provision for citizens and it works on a locality level.

“Multiple primary care practices coming together working with the ambulance service, the hospitals and also then integrated neighbourhood teams. It’s a great model for the whole country.”

Dr Rifat Rashid, Hospital Executive Director at Heartlands Hospital, said: “I feel really proud (of Richard’s comments).

“I feel it’s something we as team can really celebrate being the pioneers and trailblazers in this field.”