Change NHS – have you had your say yet?

Ruth Carlyle, Head of Knowledge and Library Services (NHS KLS Leadership), NHS England and Neena Shukla Morris, Information Resources Librarian, Brighton & Sussex Medical School, UHSussex

The NHS in England is currently going through its largest-ever consultation on the development of services over the next ten years. The Health Libraries Group (HLG) with CILIP has provided an organisational response, in which we have emphasised the importance of health libraries in providing access to evidence in ways that support all three of the proposed strategic shifts for the NHS: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from treatment to prevention of illness.

The consultation is currently open for individual responses. You can respond as a member of the public and as a member of staff in the NHS or health services. You can also share ideas for improving the NHS.

In case, it is helpful as you generate your own ideas, through the HLG response we called for:

  1. Supported access to evidence as a right for the public and NHS staff
  2. A commitment to develop a national knowledge management strategy for the NHS
  3. Investment in librarians to support the public to engage with reliable information and access online health services 
  4. Strengthening the culture of evidence-informed decision-making at every level of the NHS 
  5. Ensuring all NHS staff are enabled and encouraged to use clinical decision support tools in their day-to-day practice 
  6. Enabling integrated care systems to optimize and mobilize knowledge to underpin a learning health system approach 
  7. Improving the quality of research outputs and strengthening research activity by NHS staff
  8. Developing a national current awareness service 
  9. Investing in a new NHS publishing function, with associated open-access journal titles in priority areas, and a repository to facilitate sharing of evidence, enabling open access and cost-effective publishing of articles and reports that derive from research funded by the NHS and its partners 
  10. Expanding the NHS Knowledge and Library workforce, ensuring equity of access for staff and learners in all clinical settings
  11. Developing NHS knowledge and library services in primary and community care settings 
  12. Equipping NHS staff to share tacit knowledge 
  13. Promoting greater use of the evidence base of implementation science, quality improvement and organizational change

To learn more about the NHS Change consultation and share your thoughts, go to https://change.nhs.uk/en-GB/.