The think tank NPC has called on the government to spend £10m from the existing NHS budget as a start-up fund for partnership work with health charities.
At the same time, NPC has today published a discussion paper, Supporting Good Health, that looks at the relationship between healthcare and the voluntary sector.
It comes after the NHS Five Year Forward View by Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, was published last week, setting out a vision for the future of the NHS.
The Stevens review set out the financial problems faced by the NHS and said one of the solutions was to make it a “better partner with voluntary organisations”. But it also said charities were not well understood by NHS bosses.
NPC said its paper provides a review of the value that charities can offer the NHS.
To make the most of their potential, the government should divert £10m, 0.1 per cent of the £93.6bn NHS budget for 2013/14, into a programme for fundraising partnership between the NHS and the most effective health charities, NPC said.
The think tank said it is clear from Stevens’ report that existing attempts to forge these partnership are underperforming. The money would fund a programme of training, events and pilot funding.
In its Supporting Good Health report, NPC says there are more than 6,500 health charities in the UK that spend a total of £4bn a year.
Some charities already have a high-profile with the NHS such as Macmillan nurses and the statutory care provided by Age UK, it says.
It finds three main areas where charities could do more to improve NHS services - patient representation and health inequalities, prevention and early intervention, and design and delivery of services.
It says key strengths of the charity sector include that it “occupies a unique position between the system and the beneficiary”; a charity can act as a trusted, independent intermediary and improve coordination between different parts of the system.
The sector provides joined-up, holistic support, including preventative action and early intervention, and works to address the social determinants of health, it says.
A large proportion of charities are involved in service delivery and they can have a positive impact by influencing how services are designed and delivered, it says.
David Bull (pictured), policy and development officer at NPC and one of the authors of the paper, said: “Five Year Forward was a stark reminder that the NHS needs some new thinking and new ways of working. It assumes that the voluntary sector can step-up and play a big role, but provides few details about how.
“We know that the best charities have huge potential, especially in early intervention work which was given such prominence by Simon Stevens. As independent, flexible partners, charities’ expertise and local knowledge can be invaluable to improving the nation’s health. But there are also substantial barriers that stop them doing so, some internal to charities and some based on the sheer complexity of the way the health system today works.
“At the heart of the Stevens Review is a call for more local, personalised care. Charities can be better placed than anyone to tap into the needs of the people they help every day, and the future of the NHS clearly depends on making the most of this.”
