Oxleas NHS Rehabilitation Service Redesign and Staff Wellbeing: A CaseStudy of Ivy Willis House
There is no disputing the fact that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is currently in deep financial trouble. With steady increase in the population and increasing demands on its services, the pressure on all the NHS trusts continues to increase day by day. Despite all these, the country still grapples with its own economic problems which make it extremely difficult to provide enough money needed to fund the NHS. Owing to the importance of health care to national development, the UK public is not ready to compromise its demand for quality health services that must be free at the point of delivery. As the prime minister pointed out in one of her TV interviews, there is no magic tree from which money could be plucked endlessly to fund the NHS services. The government however considered it necessary to cut funding to public sector services to fill the hole in the economy. This translated into pressures mounted on all government departments to cut their expenses and the NHS is not exempted. Different NHS trusts responded differently. For example, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust responded by redesigning many of its services and directorates to devise a new way of working in a smart, efficient and less expensive way. The aim of this paper is to look into one of these redesign programmes with a view to evaluate its impacts on staff welfare.