by Sue Brown, CEO ARMA
The majority of people with an MSK condition will rarely, if ever, need secondary care for that condition. All of them will need primary and community care. This is where people access MSK rehab, self-management support and a wide variety of treatment. Yet the main focus of the NHS remains hospitals. It’s what politicians talk about, what the media covers and where the majority of the attention of local systems focuses.
The King’s Fund has just published a report, Making Care Closer to Home a Reality, outlining why this problem occurs and some possible solutions. The report contains just one reference to MSK, but if even a few of the solutions suggested were implemented it could make a big difference to people with MSK conditions.
More leadership focus on primary and community services, raising the status of working in this sector, more long term strategy and less focus on crisis. All of this would help put community MSK services closer to where they need to be.
The report makes some interesting points about the importance of engagement. One important point about how the NHS engages with the voluntary sector rang true to me – the need to move away from framing this as what the voluntary sector can do to help the NHS. We should all be looking at what we can do to help people.
Hospital care is so central to how we think of the NHS I find it hard to imagine the NHS moving in this direction. But we must imagine it and actively work towards it. As one contributor to the report said: “If we wanted to make it work, you’re not telling me that the combined expertise, drive, passion and enthusiasm and experience of folks in the public sector in the UK couldn’t solve this problem. Of course they could.”
All of us in MSK – patient groups and healthcare professionals across primary, community and secondary – need to unite around the need to give greater focus and status to community MSK services. Can we work together and achieve this? Of course we can!