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From COVID-19 to truly integrated care
With collaboration between Healthcare systems in response to COVID-19 at an all-time high, we hosted a Webinar today to look at how the impetus for integrated care can be sustained and enhanced as we imagine the future of healthcare in the UK.
This ended up being a really good conversation. Our speakers were Tony Felton and Catherine Hayes.
Tony is an ex-medical doctor with a strong commercial background who has worked in the healthcare as a management consultant, senior executive, entrepreneur and non-executive director.
Catherine is a transformation expert, business psychologist and author who specialises in organisational and cultural change.
And what a fascinating debate it was.
This was an exploration of the dimensions of change required to capitalise on the mindset shift that has happened since COVID. Both our speakers agreed that this will start with a period of reflection, not about specifics on what we did about PPE but how organisations flexed and became resilient.
Tony Felton said, “We’ve had more transformation in a few weeks than we’ve had in a decade, there’s no going back now.” He immediately grabbed the intractable nettle that is Social Care and pointed to a whole host of aspects that will need addressing, from funding to the alignment of health services and social care itself. It ranged from how we need to treat conditions like dementia in the same way that we do heart disease, to bringing digital innovation to the challenge. He eloquently outlined the need for more outcome-based models, the need to innovate and the need to look at productivity, balancing inputs and outputs, efficiency and effectiveness. There was lots more about leadership, vision and effective transformational change in relation to the ‘How’, but also some good points about care data integration, system interoperability (particularly community integrated care) and the emergence of the “virtual hospital”.
As Catherine Hayes said, “Before we change and step into the unknown, we need to understand what’s working and what’s not working and why? Once we know that, we can work out where we need to get to, what’s the gap in between and how we’re going to get there.”
From her perspective, we need to get beyond the ‘command and control’ mindset, skilling up our leadership to be able to deal with ambiguity and complexity, and then getting beyond the western idea that we can completely control change.
Some great questions from the audience including Transformation Director, Obi Hasan, Healthcare Exec Manager, John Pullin and Simon Drew.
We packed a lot into an hour and I hope it gives everyone who invests the time to watch real food for thought.
If you would like to attend the second webinar or simply find out how we can support you around integrated care, please contact change@practicus.com or call 01491 477122
