Your NHS Needs You!

Highland MarketingOpinion Article by Myriam McLoughlin, Account Director, Highland Marketing.
The BBC recently reported that the Welsh Conservative party would introduce a £10 fine for patients who frequently miss NHS hospital appointments, should they win power at next year's assembly election.

This view has been echoed by health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who believes that charging patients who miss NHS appointments will ensure people take greater responsibility for the use of precious resources, although he admits that imposing such charges would be difficult to implement.

Missed appointment have always been a huge issue for the NHS as figures show that since 2012/13 missed hospital appointments have cost more than £180 million, the BBC reports.

With 30% to 50% of people not using their medicines as intended, medication prescribed but not used is another source of waste to the NHS. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society estimates there is around £150 million of avoidable medicines waste.

In a bid to address this, the government is planning for packets of prescription medication over £20 to display how much their contents have cost taxpayers.

As the NHS is under such financial pressure, it is time for the general public to have a better understanding of how money is spent in the NHS and more importantly for them to understand that they have a role to play to ensure the system is sustainable.

So what can the government do to get the message across to patients that as much as they need the NHS, the NHS needs them too!

Although the NHS is free at the point of use, it is funded by taxpayers. The government needs to make it clearer to the general public that any money wasted, either through missed appointments or unused medicines, costs patients more either through higher taxes or reduced services.

Over the years there have been various public awareness campaigns, mainly to direct patients to use the right service. A good example is NHS England’s ‘Feeling under the weather?’ campaign, which aimed to reduce pressure on the NHS urgent and emergency care system during the winter of 2014/15. Its focus was to influence changes in public behaviour to help reduce the number of elderly and frail people requiring emergency admissions through urgent and emergency care services, particularly A&E departments, with illnesses that could have been effectively managed elsewhere.

Although the campaign had a clear call to action, it had limited visibility being mainly promoted via posters and social media.

If the government wants to make a real impact, it will need to engage with the general public on channels such as TV and radio and make the message quite clear about the need to become a responsible user of the healthcare system.

Patient choice and empowerment are the new buzzwords and are most welcome. However it is important to ensure that they are not linked to a feeling of entitlement.

Because otherwise the alternative won't be to charge those that miss their hospital or GP appointments, but to charge everybody to see their doctor in the first instance.

Myriam McLoughlin, account director, Highland Marketing

Most Popular Now

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

Are You Eligible for a Clinical Trial? C…

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers...

Global Study Reveals How Patients View M…

How physicians feel about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has been studied many times. But what do patients think? A team led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...