Portsmouth, Fareham, Gosport & S.E Hampshire -Rethinking care for people with long-term conditions

The NHS is looking again at how it supports people with long-term conditions living in Portsmouth, Fareham and Gosport, and South Eastern Hampshire – and is asking patients for help in getting services right.

Doctors feel that the health service is still too focused on providing a short-term response when someone’s health is in crisis, rather than working with patients to stop them becoming acutely ill in the first place. Instead, the ambition is to help patients to know more about their condition, to be able to stay well and in control, and to know what to do should their health deteriorate.

As part of the search for better services, patients with long-term conditions are being encouraged to tell NHS leaders about the care they receive now – both the good, and the not-so-good – and the care they would like to receive in future.

As a first step, the NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) covering Portsmouth, Fareham and Gosport and South Eastern Hampshire are running a patient survey(surveymonkey.com/r/?sm=Qer7... and then there will be a series of face-to-face meetings between doctors and groups of patients, to explore in more detail how services can be improved. The survey will be open until the end of July. Paper copies are available by calling Nick Brooks on [phone].