The Opportunity to Transform Complex Care at Home

Kerry Hinton, is CEO of HealthNet and in this blog he explains why the provider is now expanding its scope of services to cover the entire High-Tech Homecare market.

Historically, HealthNet's focus has been the Mid-Tech market with selective involvement in High-Tech. That is changing following our investment in leadership, capacity, and clinical capability which will allow us to offer our services across all High-Tech therapy areas. We are now ready to move decisively into this space.

High-Tech Homecare remains a sector with significant scope for broader provision, presenting an important opportunity to work alongside the NHS to improve access, capacity and patient outcomes. Our goal is to give NHS partners greater choice and to ensure more patients receive high-quality care in the comfort of their own homes.

At HealthNet we have the nursing capacity and a highly-trained workforce to manage complex patients across multiple disease areas. What differentiates this area of homecare is not just clinical competence, it is the quality of the relationship between nurse and patient. Receiving treatment at home from a consistent, familiar clinician, creates an environment where patients feel comfortable, informed and genuinely heard.

For someone navigating a cancer diagnosis, for example, that continuity of care can be transformative and it provides opportunities that a hospital setting simply cannot replicate. That support doesn't end with treatment, our virtual nursing team remains available to patients who have ongoing questions or concerns.

We see HealthNet as a seamless extension of the NHS rather than a private provider operating independently. Our nurses will be embedded in hospital discharge planning, introduced to patients before they transition home, so there is no disruption, just continuity. Our ambition is to be indistinguishable from the hospital team in the eyes of the patient.

Delivering care in the home also demands the highest standards of clinical excellence. One-to-one care requires absolute vigilance, rapid escalation capability and a level of individual accountability that is distinct from a hospital environment. We take that responsibility seriously.

The scale of the opportunity here is significant. Approximately 640,000 patients currently receive homecare services, yet between two and three million could benefit. High-Tech Homecare has the potential to make an exponential contribution to the Neighbourhood Health Framework,  reducing pressure on NHS capacity, shifting care closer to home, and improving quality of life for patients and their families alike.

The NHS was designed for acute care but managing the growing burden of chronic conditions requires a different model, one where trusted partners deliver complex, High-Tech care in local communities, while the NHS retains full visibility and oversight. We are committed to making our systems and processes entirely transparent, so the NHS can track patient outcomes at any time.

To realise this potential fully, I believe High-Tech Homecare must be formally embedded within the complex care NHS pathway, with consistent national commissioning standards rather than the fragmented local approaches that currently exist. Variation in commissioning is a barrier to scale and that needs to change.

Finally, there is an opportunity for homecare providers to collaborate more effectively. If we collectively mapped our nursing capacity and offered it as a unified resource to the NHS, the difference we could make, for patients, for the health system and for the communities we serve, would be extraordinary.

Link to Full Report