Changing clinical pathways is one of the biggest challenges in moving to a population health approach. It requires not only development of new care models, but clinical roles and adoption of new ways of working.
While the specialty of anaesthesia is seeing an evolution of the anaesthetist into the ‘perioperative care physician’, this new role cannot work in isolation and the ‘prehab to rehab’ model will only be successful with the buy in of ICSs, their leaders and staff across all providers.
We believe that the implementation of this model of care across system providers can provide the tools needed to help ICSs achieve their goal of improving the health of local populations.
A Teachable Moment
The RCoA’s report A Teachable Moment – Delivering Perioperative Medicine in Integrated Care Systems contains a detailed analysis of the first ten ICSs and offers a series of practical solutions for each to embed perioperative best practice to support their identified clinical priorities and develop related pathways.
CPOC will strive to facilitate greater collaboration between specialties to improve perioperative care pathways, and we look forward to working with Government and arms-length bodies to support them as they play a key role as catalysts of the culture change needed to achieve this.