TTA Archives 2005-2012

Last week, in his first major speech, Andrew Lansley, the new Coalition Government’s Health Secretary said that the previous Government had put too much emphasis on ‘process targets’ to the detriment of quality healthcare. His prime example was people being discharged from NHS hospitals too early for their recovery in order to keep the hospitals’ throughput (and therefore income) up. He said that in future hospitals would not be reimbursed for re-admissions within 30 days of discharge. Predictably, the medical profession jumped to the assumption that patients would have to be kept in longer, which would have a detrimental effect on hospital capacity. No one mentioned the role telehealth technology can help play in meeting both aims and, as far as we know, there were no press releases from telehealth companies making that point. Strange. Info on the speech from eGovMonitor.