Events & Insights

As an operational leader in the NHS, I would want to change the number of opposing constitutional standards.

It would be to make governance more consistent. To my mind, governance should be like a game of premier league football…

I’d love for the NHS to be removed from political change. I know this is a Nirvana-like state but we can all dream.

It would be to ensure collaboration and cooperation are embedded into every aspect of the NHS. I have seen first-hand, the power that collaboration has in delivering sustainable high quality services.

It would be that out-of-hospital services, provided by a combination of acute hospitals, community health & social care organisations and the voluntary sector, are frequently disconnected.

Whenever I support an organisation with the development of their savings programme…

I would change the financial incentives so that all organisations are rewarded for the achievement of patient-determined outcomes….

The amount of NHS footprint that goes unused on a routine basis borders on the criminal and needs to change…

We’ve been talking about integrating health and social care for many years now – and yet evidence of meaningful progress is rarely seen.

The obvious ‘one thing’ that most would choose would be more money! But I am convinced that would not be the solution and would actually compound the already lopsided current system.

I’d restore ‘Prevention of ill-health’ as a key priority for the NHS. One of the less controversial aspects of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 reforms at the time, was the transfer of public health commissioning from the NHS to local authorities.

We invest billions every year in pills, potions, treatments and surgery and yet we invest little in psychological support. And I don’t mean counselling – I mean psychological support delivered by highly – skilled clinicians.

For three decades our health and care policies vacillated between three competing needs, with the third priority having an increasingly dominant run.

About the NHS it would be its lack of consistency. I spend time in a lot of different organisations and there are significant variations in practice that can mean less than optimal clinical care for patients, as well as additional unnecessary expens

Apart from the obvious wish for enhanced funding to arrive, the greatest limitation I have found with the NHS is the inability to plan service delivery (and thereby cost savings) over a long period.

After training over a thousand leads and clinical staff in the use of Quality Improvement (QI) tools, I am passionate about skills and capability building for NHS staff. If we always do what we have done, we will get the same results.

It would be around the “connectivity of care” and effective seamless “handovers” – or dare I say it, have no “handovers” at all!
t is widely known that with every “hand off” at least 1-2 days delay are inbuilt into the patients journey – which can lead to more mistakes, confusion around who has done what already, deterioration of the patient, re-reviewing patients and Community out of-hospital staff having difficulty locating and receiving patients.

The NHS is steeped in history and tradition, and has a strong surrounding infrastructure to support regulatory compliance, but sometimes this can lead to compartmentalisation of roles. I would change the way we think about clinical governance and how it sometimes gets separated out from operational and financial activity.

The value and place of the NHS is not in question, nor is its contribution to the quality of all our lives. But something needs to change if policies on personal responsibility are to embed more widely

f I could change one thing (politics aside) it would be to take a sledge hammer and open the whole lot up, take away the barriers, share information openly and work as a truly single organisation, only then will we be able to get to the root cause of our problems and solve them together.

It would be with management structures. The great companies have one thing in common: a world-class management system. One that cascades from top to bottom of the organisation, allowing management of their business at all levels and a clear line of sight from board to shop floor.

’d use the average income per specialty information to achieve standardisation of funding to providers across the NHS. National data exists or can be generated that would provide a basis for comparison to a peer group of similar providers at a specialty level.