The AHSN Network Supporting the Health and Care Reset
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant operational impact upon England’s health and care system, leading to unprecedented rapid innovation and transformation across a wide range of services. This innovation and transformation has, in the main, been brought about by a necessity to change at pace: flexing and shifting the system to focus on the care of Covid-19 patients, ensuring the system is able to continue delivering as much routine care as possible, and ensuring vulnerable patient groups continue to receive the essential care they require. Much of this rapid change presents a valuable opportunity to learn and inform the future.
The AHSN Network is clear that the focus should be on Reset: not simply seeking to rapidly return to how things were in the past, but rather to look back at the rapid progress made in the short term and using that to inform the future in the longer term.
Find out more about how the AHSNs are supporting Reset
How Wessex AHSN has supported health and care partners to tackle the pandemic and Reset – looking forward
The AHSN is in a unique space to support our dedicated frontline services. We have access to a range of innovations - digital and medical - which can support this. From supporting GP practices and care homes to use video calling technology, to the quick uptake and implementation of electronic prescribing, through to supporting new PPE equipment to be approved and ready-to-use; we have quickly realigned our resources, staff and expertise to support the overall response to tackling the pandemic. This included our staff – where possible – returning to clinical practice.
We have learned many things over the past few months: that trusted relationships built over years with local and national partners provide the foundations for a strong adaptive response to the crisis; that staff at every level of every organisation have enormous depths of creativity and commitment; and that the public are more willing than we ever imagined to participate in experiments with services provided in radically different ways.
Looking forward a major piece of work around rapid insight to build adaptive capability in our systems, how care has been delivered in response to Covid-19.
There is an opportunity to use the experience and learning from these changes to plan for recovery and a return to a ‘new normal’.
See Wessex AHSN’s Annual Review and response to the Covid-19 pandemic – work completed mid-March to June 2020:
Links to highlight Wessex support during Covid-19 pandemic:
