The Wanless review of health and social care in Wales concluded the present system is unsustainable and major change is needed to meet the demands of the future. Here, Health Minister Jane Hutt sets out her vision for the future and the vital role patients will play
THE NHS needs to reform. The Wanless Review demands change. Patients and the public want change. Reform is essential, and we must be courageous in facing it.
One vitally important part of this reform is involving people and strengthening the patient's voice.
We have to engage people in the hard choices, and carry them with us through implementing the solutions.
Our approach to driving up the quality of services must be through giving patients a stronger voice. Not just individually via patients' complaints and concerns, but also collectively and by engaging them fundamentally throughout the whole process of reform.
We should not view patients simply as customers. The many patients with chronic illnesses have specific needs and limited choices available to them, so the choices they make have little leverage on services.
That is why we need to improve services across the board, and to find a way of ensuring that the most vulnerable patients, along with everyone else, have a say in getting the quality services they deserve.
We must encourage people to play their part through initiatives like the Expert Patient Programme. Community groups and Local Health Boards already work closely at local level. These are a good start but they are not enough. We need to develop patient panels and patient support services, so that their involvement generates change and drives reform.
Examples of this are taking place in many areas such as in North Glamorgan, where a public involvement group feeds views to the trust board about services or in the Merthyr and Cynon valleys, where the Diabetes Patient Involvement Group helped by seeking views from local people on diabetes services in the area.
It is difficult for some groups to make themselves heard. One key way to increasing the patient voice is through advocacy - finding a way of listening to and promoting the voices of not just individuals but whole groups, who otherwise might not be heard.
There are already good examples of successful engagement of the community within the NHS.
In the Welsh reform agenda we need to acknowledge that innovation and success can come from communities planning the renewal of our services. Involving the community in this way must be built into all change processes from the start and be an integral part of it throughout.
Patients also have their own responsibilities in return - in particular, responsibility for their own and their family's health, in terms of diet, exercise and lifestyle, but also in accessing the NHS in an appropriate and responsible fashion.
There is clearly a willingness to change within communities, and we can see this through the numbers of applications for the Assembly's Food and Fitness Grant Scheme.
But the NHS too has a part to play in helping people behave responsibly when accessing health care. We already know that by providing booking systems we can demonstrably reduce the number of "no shows". And I see no reason why patients should not be the first to know information about their own health, which is not the always the case at the moment.
As soon as the Wanless Report was published, I announced an additional £4m to be invested in tackling delayed transfers of care. We are now confident that the first £2.7m of that investment will have released more than 100 beds in Welsh hospitals by the end of October.
With these beds, and with all the extra investment, we have to make sure that people who are waiting for treatment are seen as quickly as possible. No-one is more determined than I am to tackle waiting lists and waiting times in Wales.
Derek Wanless made the point at the Health and Social Services Committee this week that he hoped his review could help create consensus for change.
This is his challenge to us this week. We do need to sign Wales up to the "team effort" which involves us all - not just professionals. We all have a part to play.