Healthcare professionals will have to use more of their time to help patients make decisions under the government drive to introduce choice in public services, health minister Lord Warner said today.
The focus on nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals to provide patients with ample information on which to base their choices will have a "time and money cost", he told a fringe meeting at the Labour party conference.
"We know that patients will not make the choice on their own," he said.
Lord Warner said the public was clamouring for a greater say over what treatment was available and where to receive it.
"GPs, patient staff advisers, the voluntary sector and nurses will all contribute to that - dare I say patients' own relatives will contribute to that," he said.
Under the patient choice agenda, the government wants to introduce more choice into the NHS with people able to select at which hospital they are treated.
Lord Warner acknowledged concerns by the nurses' representative body, the Royal College of Nursing, that the resources are not in place to support the patient choice agenda as nurses increasingly become the "translators" of the different treatments on offer to patients.
It was a shared responsibility by the government and healthcare workers to consider the implications by using the same resources differently, he suggested.
"We are engaged in a major public health exercise and if you want people to change their lifestyle choice, we are going to have to put an effort on talking to them but it's preferable to waiting until they are very very ill to treat them," Lord Warner said.
Sarah Thewsley, chief executive of the nurse registration body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, signalled the end of the old "top-down" approach to delivering nursing care.
"The issue is whoever you are working with [as a nurse], people are able to be alongside you and to have an active debate," she told the meeting. "The modern healthcare professional needs to move out of that very paternalistic role which knowledge used to give them."
