Radical Thinking in Healthcare

I was at the NHS Confederation Conference in Liverpool last week. It was a highly stimulating forum, as always. There were keynotes which prompted some deep thinking. Above all, though, it did feel as though the debate was taking place in the wake of the Health & Social Care Act and the enormous reforms which accompanied it. There was an air of survivor guilt and impending financial doom.

Several workshops were attempting to move the debate out to the wider reaches of radical thinking. We were reminded by speakers that the models which prevail in healthcare are now at least 70 years old. For the NHS to survive, a huge change in the way it delivers care needs to happen.

Now, I have been working in the NHS since the late 1980s and have heard this type of rhetoric many times before. The economic climate is very different now, so there may just be the drivers needed to make that sort of change happen, but it is easy to remain sceptical that real change will happen on the scale that is being talked about.

Many people at the conference were complaining about political interference in attempts to make large scale change. Some are saying at the moment that we need to close 20 hospitals to get to a service that is affordable. And yet, making changes like that so often falters as politicians become involved.

A key problem at the heart of all of this is the way in which we focus on hospital buildings. Closures always look like we are losing something. And to a large extent that is true!

To shift the debate and really move forwards we need some deep thinking and generation of radical ideas that tell us what we will gain from the changes, not what we will lose.

• Tell us what the new models of care will look like.
• Tell us how they will make healthcare more responsive and focused on our needs rather than professional needs.
• Tell us why that change is going to be so compelling that it would be madness not to go that way.
• Engage us in a debate about what might work for us.
• Think about the way that software application developers engage their customers from the start and get them involved in the design. How can we apply this in healthcare.

This is just some ‘off the cuff’ thinking on this, but it is beginning to shape some thoughts for opening up real debate, open conversations and idea generation.