The concept of ‘value’ in healthcare – maximising the outcomes which matter to people at the lowest possible cost – is increasingly seen as a key lever for supporting the delivery of high-quality sustainable healthcare. The challenge is how to do this in practice. What is clear is that clinicians and finance staff need to work closely together to support improvements in value.
Patient-level costing provides clinical teams with a rich source of information to understand their patients and services, and there are some great examples of clinicians and finance working together to identify how they can use their resources in the most effective way possible to provide high-quality care.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a pause to much of this collaborative work, and has fundamentally changed the way the NHS operates. As the UK emerges from the first wave of the pandemic, finances will once again become constrained and a focus on value will be essential to ensure resources are used well. Dr Jean MacLeod and Duncan Orme will explore how clinical and financial collaboration might look in the future.