Improving Health Outcomes for People of Working Age Sample Clauses

Improving Health Outcomes for People of Working Age. The Government and social partners agree to work together to deliver tangible improvements in the health outcomes for people of working age over a ten-year period. Our approach to health services for people of working age will be informed by a number of strategic policy frameworks including the Health Strategy: Quality and Fairness: A Health System for You (2001) and the Primary Care Strategy: “Primary Care, a New Direction” (2001). Actions to be pursued as a priority over a three-year timeframe will include: • Planning and implementing a programme of re-organisation and re-alignment of existing resources in order to deliver a person-centred primary care service through multidisciplinary teams and networks, serving defined populations. New service arrangements will facilitate the delivery of services on an integrated basis, both within the primary and community sector and across the health services as a whole. • Ensuring that service development and delivery are informed by needs assessment, undertaken at national, local and other levels as appropriate. Communities and service users will be enabled to participate in this process. • Developing primary care services drawing on the Primary Care Strategy. This will entail ongoing investment to ensure integrated, accessible services for people within their own community with a target of 300 primary care teams by 2008, 400 by 2009 and 500 by 2011. A review of these targets will be undertaken in 2008. • Further developing, as a priority, out of hours GP services with a view ultimately to having those services available to the whole population. • Reviewing all existing eligibility legislation and drafting legislation that clarifies and simplifies eligibility and entitlements to health services, in line with the goals of the National Health Strategy. • Delivering tangible reductions in waiting times for public patients, through the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), with the goal that no public patient will wait longer than three months for treatment following referral from an outpatient Department. • The Health Strategy contained a commitment to increase total acute hospital bed capacity by 3,000 by 2011. An additional 900 in-patient beds/day places are largely in place with a further 450 acute beds/day places to be put in place under the Capital Investment Framework 2005-2009. An initiative to provide an additional 1,000 beds for public patients in public hospitals was launched in 2005. In light of developm...