Real Personalisation Will Never Happen

I really get sick of a small minority of people with vested commercial interests saying that personal healthcare budgets (PHBs) delivers "personalisation". I am sick of it because they don't seem to understand what personalisation is. Such people insist that by turning patients into consumers will personalise their care. It won't, it just turns them into consumers with the responsibilities and worries that come with spending budgets carefully.

Let me give you an example of where we need personalisation, where PHBs will not deliver this personalisation, and a subject which commissioners obsessed with their version of "personalisation" have shown no interest. Prescription medications.

I have three long term conditions and so I take seven different drugs. Since one of those drugs is not available in the dose I take, I take three pills of it. That means I take five pills in the morning, two before I go to bed (the other medication I take is two types of insulin). That is a small number of pills compared to many elderly people. I am middle aged, with relatively good eyesight (OK I have diabetic retinopathy, so that increases my count of long term conditions to four). I have good co-ordination and memory. Yet I still forget to take medication. Sometimes I get to the end of the fortnight and realise that there is one pill left over in the blister pack, so clearly I had missed that pill sometime during the last 14 days, with no idea when.

My pharmacist knows what drugs I take, it's on my prescription script and she attaches a label telling me when to take them. Instead of me having blister packs for seven drugs, why not blister packs for the seven days in the week? Half of the strip for morning, half for evening. It's Tuesday, so I take the strip that is marked (IN BIG BOLD LETTERS) Tuesday. I do not have to go hunting for the right blister pack for the right drug, because that has been done by the pharmacist already.

That strip of pills can only be used by me, because no one else has my combination of long term conditions requiring exactly those doses. This is real personalisation and it will never happen.

What I would have said

Norman Lamb was on BBC Radio 4 Any Questions last night. The things he said about the NHS made me decide to call Any Answers today to refute his assertions. I called their number and spoke to a researcher who noted my response and said she would pass it on to a producer. I was then called back by a producer who checked my details but warned me that there was unlikely to be the time to discuss the NHS on this edition. She was right, the public apparently are more interested in a fiddling minister, an English Parliament or the middle class habit of taking kids on holiday in term time than the NHS.

This is what I told the researcher, and I would have said on air.

I am calling to refute the statement from Norman Lamb that the NHS is "horribly fragmented" and that his government is moving to a "joined up system". The effect of Norman Lamb's government's policies are that we are going in the opposite direction, the system getting more fragmented, not more integrated as Lamb claimed.

I have had diabetes for 40 years and for the last 20 years I have had diabetic eye disease - retinopathy. I use diabetic services in my local hospital, I use services at their eye clinic and I use GP diabetic services. Before the election all three services were commissioned by one commissioner, the local Primary Care Trust. The commissioner plans a service and ensures that patients are able to access the service, and since there was one commissioner this meant that they could decide which services were carried out in hospital and which were provided by GPs.

Since the Health and Social Care Act was enacted last April my care is commissioned by three different commissioners. The local Clinical Commissioning Group commission diabetic hospital services, the NHS England Area Team commission GP services and Public Health England commission the monitoring of my diabetic eye disease. Three different commissioners instead of one. Norman Lamb talked about "treating the whole person" but his policies have made that more difficult because there are three commissioners instead of one. I know where the CCG is located because the CCG are high profile, the other two organisations are not. I have only just found out that the NHS England Area Team who commission GP services are based 40 miles away from where I live and they commission GP services for 1.6 million people. GP are a thoroughly local service but are now commissioned by a remote and aloof organisation. I still do not know where Public Health England are based, they keep themselves to themselves.

These three commissioners do not work together. I know this because my local CCG have announced that they intend to cut the number of hospital diabetic outpatients appointments by a third, but when I asked at their public board meeting if they will ensure that local GPs have the skills to care for these diabetics denied access to the hospital clinic, I was told: "we do not commission primary care". So the CCG are allowed to decommission services at the local hospital without first ensuring that local GPs will be able to care for the patients from the cut service. If the PCT had decided they wanted to move services out of the hospital they would have been able to do this because they commissioned both hospital services and primary care.

The result of the mess of my care being commissioned by three different organisations who do not talk to each other is that NHS services are becoming far more fragmented.