It is interesting to reflect – now that the PFI bonanza has come to an end and we all have to hunker down and work out how to pay for it for the next 30 years – on what we have spent all the money on and consider whether what we have thrown up around the land is actually what we need.

This paper by the think tank Reform The Hospital is Dead Long Live The Hospital is an eloquent exposition of Clayton Christensen’s ‘Innovator’s Prescription’ within an NHS context. The essential conclusion of both of these is that Hospitals need to move from being ‘A place where sick people go’ to becoming ‘An organisation that keeps people well’. This re-framing of purpose prompts the question – what does a hospital that keeps people well look like? I suspect it is not a large building with lots of beds in it (or clinic rooms for that matter).

Interestingly the specialty of Intensive Care Medicine underwent a similar re-framing of purpose over ten years ago as a result of the comprehensive critical care program in response to a lack of intensive care beds. The outcome of this process was the introduction of critical care outreach teams (or medical emergency response teams) linked to a system of population surveillance (MEWS track and trigger) and an expansion of lower acuity beds (high dependency). There were almost no additional intensive care beds commissioned or provided. The result has been intensive care units have been able absorb ten years of demand growth, almost eliminate the need for inter hospital transfer for capacity reasons, reduce futile care, contain costs and improve outcome.

How do we replicate this operating model at the scale of the hospital within a health economy (as opposed to an intensive care unit in a hospital)? The essential elements are:
1) Knowing the population you are caring for – a disease registry
2) Knowing how they are – a simple method of measuring disease status
3) A response team that averts crisis when a trigger threshold is reached – a specialist community team
4) An escalation pathway that includes rapid access to specialist input – specialty hubs
5) Lower acuity beds for step up or step down care – intermediate care beds
6) Alternate pathways for those that acute care is inappropriate – end of life services
7) Acute beds for those that genuinely need it – closely linked to an intensive care unit!

This distributed model of care does still need buildings – but what it needs more is intelligent information and communication systems used by a workforce that understands the need to keep patients other than those in genuine need away from hospital. It also needs an operating system that measures its impact, analyses unexpected pathway deviance and learns from system failure.

Eliminating the huge waste in the system of inappropriate and futile hospital care (both inpatient and outpatient) will not only deliver cost savings it will improve quality of care and outcomes and create the capacity we need for the growth in demand we know is coming.

The hospital is no longer a building it is a healthcare delivery system. We should be investing in the infrastructure that makes it possible – And that is not bricks and mortar…