James Sanderson, Director of Personalised Care at NHS England and speaker at #RCOT2019, talks to us about the opportunity personalised care offers occupational therapists in England to support people in ever more innovative ways.
James Sanderson oversees strategy and delivery for a range of programmes at NHS England that are helping to empower people to have greater choice and control over their care; including shared decision-making, personalised care and support planning, approaches to self-management support, self-care, personal health budgets, social prescribing and patient choice.
Formerly Chief Executive and Accounting Officer for the Independent Living Fund, James has had a significant amount of experience working with occupational therapists over the years, both at ILF and NHS England, and he 'absolutely recognises' that personalised care is 'at the heart of occupational therapy practice'.
'Occupational therapists naturally are geared up to begin with that conversation of what matters to somebody; taking them through the opportunity to develop methodologies, systems and approaches to achieving greater activity and their goals,' he says.
'There have been many approaches to personalised care, or person-centred care, over the years, in both health and social care settings, but what I've discovered in the NHS is that, despite some really excellent progress and examples across the country, these individual programmes were quite fragmented from each other, or from the system; almost being delivered alongside what people consider to be the mainstay of NHS services.'
As a result, James stresses that he is keen to bring everything together in a much more coherent way.
'These programmes are interdependent,' he says. 'You cannot undertake successful social prescribing without understanding what that means to an individual and looking holistically at their needs from a personalised care and support plan.
'So we wanted to bring all these disciplines and enablers together, to create a much more cohesive approach, because when delivered in concert, these things create much better outcomes for individuals and the system.'
In order to make personalised care a reality, NHS England wants up to 2.5 million people to be benefitting by 2023-24. But how can occupational therapists help to achieve this rather ambitious goal?
Recognising this is a large-scale aspiration, James adds: 'If we weren't being so ambitious, I don't think we would properly achieve the shift we need. The long-term plan for the NHS sets out some key things; reforming primary care, changes to accident and emergency, moving to digital services and looking at population health, through the creation of integrated care systems.'
And within all this features personalised care. '[We have] probably the biggest statement on personalised care within any healthcare system, so 2.5 million people is ambitious, [and we want to] double that again over the next 10 years, but I think it is absolutely achievable.'
However, as he exclaims, there is huge amount of scope to go even further. 'If you take things like social prescribing, for example, we estimate that there is an opportunity to support around 900,000 people. We think that we should have around 200,000 people receiving a personal health budget over the next five years.
'And if you properly put in shared decision-making and planning, and clinical conversations… you can see the scope of extending this.'
On the issue of precipitating the required culture change, he reflects: 'I think that other healthcare professionals can learn a huge amount from occupational therapy, because of the way in which [personalised care] is part of the ethos.'
He expands: 'To land personalised care in the system we do need to encourage a culture change. That's where occupational therapists working in multidisciplinary teams within primary care can bring about a huge opportunity to open those conversations and help colleagues understand why the approach to putting people at the centre of their care and support and adapting services to meet their individual needs, and taking an asset-based approach to healthcare, is something they can bring to that discussion at a local level.
As we go forward, the opportunity to use occupational therapy as part of a combined approach to supporting people in innovative and new ways is really important.
James Sanderson, Director of Personalised Care, NHS England, will speak on 'What does personalised care mean for occupational therapists?' at the RCOT annual conference, 17 and 18 June 2019, ICC Birmingham (session 20).
Read the full interview with OTnews editor Tracey Samuels on pages 14-15 of the April 2019 issue.