As part of its drive to create more sustainable and efficient services, NHS Fife is starting a range of activities to help inform and educate people across Fife about our progress in re-forming and our plans to transform the delivery of healthcare services across the Kingdom in response to the real and immediate challenges currently facing the Board.
Like all Health Boards across the country, NHS Fife is facing unprecedented financial pressures. In response the Health Board intends to transform the ways in which delivers many of its services over the coming months to make best use of its finite resources to continue to provide quality healthcare provision for people in Fife.
NHS Fife is required to reduce spending by £51.4 million in this financial year in order that we live within the budget allocated by Scottish Government, which equates to a 6% saving across services. This means identifying a range of efficiencies that will also require NHS Fife to make some difficult decisions, at pace. This will include how we prioritise and protect core services and look at how, where, and when these services are delivered, to ensure that we can meeting changing demands and deliver these within our existing resources.
NHS Fife has had to move quickly and significant progress has already been made with around £23 million of savings already identified. This has been achieved by closing under-utilised administration buildings and improving efficiency of use generally across the estate, making changes to the way some services are managed, reducing our use of agency staff, delivering efficiencies in how our medicines are delivered, and re-negotiating some existing finance contracts.
An additional £26 million in savings still needs to be identified and that means that tough decisions will need to be made during the remainder of this financial year, that will likely impact some services in Fife.
The COVID pandemic was by far the most significant event affecting the NHS since its formation and has drastically changed the way in which people access healthcare, not just in Fife but across Scotland, the rest of the UK and beyond.
Health Boards constantly change and evolve the way that services are delivered to meet changing patient needs, reflect new practices and technological advances and national policy decisions and balance this with ensuring that boards can continue to offer quality care for patients.
The current reality is that NHS Fife cannot provide services in the same way that it does now and has to adapt the way it operates to respond to those changes. The current financial climate for public sector bodies means that the Health Board must act quickly to ensure it can operate sustainably within its allocated £1.1 billion budget.
Over recent months, clinical teams across Fife have been developing plans to help re-form healthcare services, ensuring they are both sustainable and fit for the future. These changes are clinically led, patient-focused and will prioritise safety.
Ben Hannan is NHS Fife’s executive lead responsible for managing the boards re-form and transformation plans.
Ben said: “Given the scale and complexity of the challenge we want to ensure people across Fife understand how we intend to transform the delivery of health and care services, the reasons why we need to make changes, lay out how these changes are likely to affect local people and any mitigations put in place to minimise any initial impact and to ensure safe and sustainable services.”
This week NHS Fife has launched it’s new ‘Let’s Talk’ campaign to enable frank and honest dialogue with people in Fife about the current position, upcoming changes, and how NHS Fife intends to create more sustainable and adaptable services while continuing to offer high-quality patient care for communities across the whole of Fife.
The campaign is designed to look more broadly than simply financial resources and looks across a range of service areas to increase awareness and help people better understand the parameters in which these services are required to operate, and the clinical rationale for change.
Ben Hannan added:
“The work we are doing to transform our services is happening safely and at pace and we are committed to ensuring that we are entirely open about the changes we need to make and the drivers for change. Through this activity we hope to create mutual understanding and help inform and educate the communities we serve to ensure they fully understand the enormity and the complexities of the task in hand.
“Difficult decisions will have had to be taken to ensure safe, sustainable and equity of access to services for the whole population of Fife.
“Our ‘Let’s Talk’ campaign is intended to be a two-way conversation where we can hear from those who use or services, address concerns, and dispel some of the common misconceptions about how healthcare services are planned and currently delivered.
“In the coming months we want engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue with people in Fife as we address the difficult decisions that will need to be made and create a more sustainable NHS Fife that meets the needs of everyone in our community”.
For more information on Let’s Talk and for more information on the efforts to transform healthcare services in Fife, visit: www.nhsfife.org/lets-talk.
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Notes to Editors:
The intended changes to services are in line with NHS Fife’s values and are designed to support the priorities set out in the NHS Fife’s Population Health and Wellbeing Strategy, which is publicly available on the Board website.
