In the second of this (actually 3-part!) series, I’m looking at how politics and social movement are vital at changing the health and wellbeing of our society, communities and the environment we live in. Together We Can!
Four Circles of Population Health
In my previous blog in this series, I wrote about the ‘Pentagon Model’ which we have developed in Morecambe Bay to help us think about how we manage Population Health. The Pentagon approach actually forms one of four parts of some over-lapping circles, based on 4-Ps (Population Health Approach, Partnerships, Places, People Movement), which give a more holistic view of what is involved.
At the heart of the model we are working with, sits the people and communities who live in Morecambe Bay. Communities can be geographical, communities of interest (e.g. faith-based/workplaces etc), or transient (e.g. students). We are absolutely passionate that we do not do things TO people and communities, but rather, guided by the brilliant principle that ‘nothing about me, without me, is for me’, we do things with the people and communities we are trying to serve. We look to co-design, co-create and co-produce our services, because the services belong to the people. This takes culture change and some new thinking on our part and we are learning to work differently.
Our Venn-diagram gives us a framework with which to think about Population Health more clearly. The Population Health Approach Pentagon of prevent, detect, protect, manage, recover really forms one of the circles. Included within this, also, are a few other important factors. Firstly culture. If we don’t get culture right, then we don’t get care right. I’ve done three separate vlogs on the kind of culture we are trying to embed across the health and care system in Morecambe Bay – Joy, Kindness and Excellence. Secondly, we are redesigning work around various different health problems, for example, diabetes or respiratory problems WITH people who actually live with those conditions and use our services on a regular basis, building pathways for people that actually make sense and work for everybody. Thirdly, we are taking time to really understand the data available to us through many sources and using it to enable both the leadership team and our local teams to make informed decisions about where we need to focus our efforts to improve care.
More than ever before it means that we need to share resources with other organisations in order for us to be able to cope with current budget constraints. It also means that we have to think very carefully about where we align our resources. One of the issues for us in population health is that we have never really tackled the growing health inequalities in society. It is simply NOT OK that some people in this Bay die 15-20 years earlier than people who live 6 miles down the road. It is also NOT OK, that it is in these areas of higher deprivation, where we also see more complex medical and social problems, but do not allocate the money or the staffing to cope with the increased demand. And yes – it is true, that the problems are complex, and so money and resource is not the only answer, but it is definitely a part of the answer! If we’re ever going to make an inroad into changing the health of our population and tackling health inequality, we need to apply the triple value approach of Professor Sir Muir Grey – of how we prioritise our resources. (http://www.nhsconfed.org/blog/2015/05/the-triple-value-agenda-should-be-our-focus-for-this-century). Here is a short clip about it, if you’re interested! (https://vimeo.com/155569869).
Partnerships are absolutely key in improving the health of the population. There is so much cross over between county and city/district councils, the police, the fire service, the NHS in it’s various guises (including mental health, GPs, acute hospital trusts and community services), the CVFS and indeed the business sector. The relationships at strategic-leadership level and within each locality are the oil that allow us to work effectively together. It is only through honest, transparent vulnerability that we learn to trust each other and to share the resources we have to serve the needs of the population. As social care continues to sit under the remit of the County Councils and Health remains under the NHS, increasingly devolved into the regional Integrated Care Systems, without a deeper and more shared accountability and effective working together we will not have the necessary leadership to enable local team to transform the future of care.
This is where Place becomes really important. It is harder to get culture right, and build relationships that really work well if we’re always talking about “working at pace and scale”. As services are reconfigured, it is important that team structure allows for small enough teams to enable good working relationships to happen and that the necessary work is done to get culture right! I was in conversation with Professor Sir Chris Ham, CEO of the King’s Fund, and he is adamant that it is at this local neighbourhood level where the real change takes place, because this is where we are able to work with people and our communities in a very real way. That’s why we are so passionate about our Integrated Care Communities (ICCs). This is where, in a very relational way, traditional barriers between organisations are broken down and new bonds are formed in working together for local communities across the public and community-voluntary-faith sector (CVFS). There is a real danger that we focus so much on the ‘super structures’ and put huge time and energy into reorganising the system and lose sight, in the process, of the very thing we are trying to do, which is to make care better! Our ICC teams must feel the full permission and receive the resource needed to do this transformational work.
The reality is, however, that unless we have a people movement for improved health and wellbeing, nothing will change. The issues we are facing health and care-wise are incredibly complex and multi-faceted. In Morecambe Bay, we currently spend £1.20 for every £1 we receive. We are doing our very best to try and reimagine how we deliver health and social care, working more efficiently in partnership and redistributing resource where we can – but when we are all in financial deficit (and in our local NHS we need to cut our cloth by £120 million over the next 3 years – 1/5th of our total budget) when we have already had some eye watering cuts to the county councils budgets, especially in the area of public health, there is only so much we can achieve! We understand the frustrations that people feel when it comes to health and care, but we cannot fix it from within the system alone. There is a need for us all to recognise that things we could provide a few years ago may no longer be available or not within the same time frame as previously. It would be wrong of us as health leaders to simply make changes without the communities having a say. But for example, if we are to improve our Children and Adolescents Mental Health Service in South Cumbria (which is desperately needed), we might, as an example, need to do less knee and hip replacements……we simply can’t afford it all, with our current allocations of resource and staff, and therefore we need local people to work with us on this, and help us work out where our priorities should be. We know, if we don’t involve our communities in these decisions, complaints will go through the roof, which drives down morale and is utterly exhausting for teams to deal with. However, we are going to have to be brave in some of our decision making.
As a society, we also need to all be more healthy and well, taking care of ourselves and each other.Some might argue this is all down to personal choice. Of course, there is some choice involved – however, when you read the National Audit Office report (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44468437) into the huge difficulties Universal Credit is causing, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report into Destitution in the UK 2018 (https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/destitution-uk-2018) then you begin to realise that it is easier to make healthy choices in some communities far more than in others. These are inconvenient truths, and need to be reflected upon with due diligence. There is a danger that we choose to work with highly motivated communities to improve health and wellbeing and actually make health inequalities worse. However, if we really listen to what is going on with local communities and work together, we can do some great stuff . Work from the University of Birmingham shows that if we can see a change in just 3% of our population, then this will have an effect on 90%. As the work in Canterbury, New Zealand shows though, this takes time and relationship – the process is actually more important than the end product. And for an under-resourced, already exhausted community, supporting any social movement requires investment at many layers. The NHS 5-year forward view and the learning from the Institute for Health Innovation both recognise that social movements/people movements are key to transformational change. We must press on with this work, and base it on a foundation of love and collaboration if we are really to change things together. So, this is why we are so passionate about really working with our communities, here in Morecambe Bay and will continue to host and hold space for community conversations. We are talking about many things, from economic development, to childhood, education, loneliness and mental health. These spaces are vital for us to connect together, hear one another, meet people who are different from us because it is only together that can reimagine a future that is good for the planet and socially just for humanity.
Health and Society – Can we make a Difference? Part 1 – Economics
If we want to make a difference to health and wellbeing in society, tackling health inequalities, whilst protecting the health and wellbeing of the environment and creating a fair and just save for humanity…..we have to ask ourselves some searching questions about whether or not our current economic models are really fit for purpose. In this vlog (which is the first in a 3, not 2-part series) I draw on the excellent work of Kate Raworth and question our obsession with growth, when what we actually need is a flourishing economy…….
Mental Health Help
Here is a series of 5 videos I did for Mental Health Awareness Week this year. Mental health is SO important and struggling with mental health issues, is NOTHING to be ashamed of. These videos cover, depression, anxiety, exam stress, suicide and getting to the roots of stress. There has been really positive response through Facebook, so here they are all in one place through my YouTube Channel.
Creating a Culture of Excellence
This is the 3rd in a 3-part series on how we can create great working cultures. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. The first two vlogs were on joy and kindness; this one focuses on excellence. If we don’t get culture right, we don’t get care right – and in the NHS, that is fundamentally what we are about. This one comes with a health warning! If we try and only build a culture of excellence, without first building a culture of joy and kindness, we will create a very unhappy working environment with low morale and poor quality. Excellence is built on joy and kindness!!
Population Health – The Pentagon Approach
Here in Morecambe Bay, thanks especially to the excellent work of Marie Spencer, David Walker, Jane Mathieson, Hannah Maiden and Jacqui Thompson, we have together developed a way of thinking about population health, which we call the ‘Pentagon Approach’. It draws on learning over a number of years from Public Health England and the World Health Organisation, and synergises nicely with the vision and approach of our excellent Directors of Public Health in Lancashire and Cumbria. It forms part of our overall population health strategy, which I want to give some focus to over a few short blogs. In this blog I will focus on the Pentagon and what we mean by each bit of it!
Population health means different things to different organisations, groups and individuals. However there is agreement that population health is determined by a complex range of interacting factors e.g. social and economic, lifestyle, access to services, including health, as well as our genes, age and sex.
Most of these factors lie outside of the health care system but have significant impact on individual and population health. Lord Darzi recently wrote in the 2016 WISH report (https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/healthy-populations) that we have talked about making a difference to population health for decades, but no-one has really grasped the nettle to make the changes we need to see, particularly around health inequalities. Responsibility for addressing these issues are fragmented. Therefore we need to ensure that we work with a multitude of partners to:
- Understand the problem and set clear goals for improvement
- Focus on the determinants of health and not just health care
- Generate shared accountability
- Empower people and communities and develop their capabilities
- Embed health equity as a core element.
Therefore Population Health in Morecambe Bay is defined as:
“The health outcomes of our citizens as a group, including the distribution of those outcomes across the geography of Morecambe Bay.”
In Morecambe Bay, we have developed a way of thinking about Population Health through the means of five key strands, namely – Prevent, Detect, Protect, Manage and Recover.
Various definitions currently exist around these words, but in Morecambe Bay, the definitions will be used as follows:
Prevention
Prevention means preventing disease or injury before it ever occurs. This is done through:
- Working with communities and other partners to tackle the underlying social determinants of health (e.g. living and working conditions, social isolation, health literacy etc.)
- Encourage the development of health in all policies
- The promotion of positive behavioural choices which improve a person’s health and wellbeing (e.g. stop smoking, reduce alcohol, take regular exercise, eat healthily)
- Preventing exposures to hazards that cause disease or injury (e.g. through hand hygiene, health and safety )
- Increasing resistance to disease or injury, should exposure occur (e.g. immunisation programmes)
Prevention can be primary (before a diagnosis) or secondary (after a diagnosis), but always refers to creating an environment that supports healthy choices, lifestyle changes, rather than medical intervention.
Detection
Detection means early recognition that:
- a person is developing increased risk factors which may predispose them to a more serious condition (e.g. obesity, rising cholesterol, high BP, low mood)
- a person has developed a chronic condition, for which they will need further protection (e.g. COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary diease, Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus)
- a local population are more at risk of developing a particular condition/set of conditions (e.g. detection of childhood obesity rates, high rates of smoking, high rates of alcohol use, poor housing or air quality )
- a local population has worse health outcomes than another, requiring appropriate resource allocation (e.g. poor cancer survival rates, high rates premature mortality, low access to preventative interventions)
Protection
Protection means:
- to protect someone from developing a condition of which they are at risk, through medical intervention (e.g. starting antihypertensive medication) – this would also go hand in hand with some further prevention measures
- to reduce the impact of a disease or injury that has already occurred (e.g. ensuring protection after a first MI of having a second MI through strict treatment of BP, cholesterol and kidney function, smoking and dietary advice)
- to soften the impacts of an ongoing illness or injury that has lasting effects (e.g. helping a person to understand a chronic condition they are living with, through structured education and ensure best evidenced treatment, to help them live at optimal health)
- to protect someone from developing a more serious condition, through surgical intervention (e.g. prophylactic bilateral mastectomy)
Management
Management means:
- to provide appropriate advice, treatment or referral for a single episode of a health complaint (e.g. minor ailments )
- to intervene at the time of a medical or surgical emergency with best evidence-based practice (e.g. transfer to a cardiology centre for management of a STEMI – [heart attack])
- to treat an exacerbation of a chronic condition through a best evidence-based intervention (e.g. an acute exacerbation of COPD)
Recovery
Recovery means:
- helping people manage long-term, often complex health problems and injuries in order to improve as much as possible their ability to function, their quality of life and their life expectancy (e.g. through cardiac/pulmonary rehabilitation, community integration, support groups, social care provision, vocational rehabilitation programmes, links to financial advice)
- recognising where people will not recover and enable good palliative care and a good death
This Pentagon describes our ‘population health approach’, but is not the complete picture of how we think about population health. More on this in some follow up blogs and vlogs.
Creating a Culture of Kindness – Vlog
Creating a Culture of Joy – Vlog
Facing Our Past, Finding a Better Future – Adverse Childhood Experiences
This week I had the privilege of listening to Prof Warren Larkin, advisor to the Department of Health on Adverse Childhood Experiences. This is something I’ve written about on this blog before and Warren has made me more determined than ever to keep talking about this profoundly important issue. This blog draws on his wisdom and learning.
I believe that Adverse Childhood Experiences are our most important Public Health issue. So I want to be really clear about what they are, how and why they affect us so deeply, where we can find help if we’ve been affected by them and how together we can change the future, by preventing them.
What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
• Physical abuse
• Sexual Abuse
• Emotional Abuse
• Living with someone who abused drugs
• Living with someone who abused alcohol
• Exposure to domestic violence
• Living with someone who was incarcerated
• Living with someone with serious mental illness
• Parental loss through divorce, death or abandonment
How Common Are They?
The answer is – far too common. There have been some really wide ranging studies across the UK and USA into the numbers of us who have experienced ACEs, and it’s not just in our “most deprived communities” but in predominantly white, middle class areas where we see the stark statistics. Depending on the study you read, between 50 and 65% have experienced at least one ACE. And shockingly 1 in 10 of us have experienced more than 4.
How and Why Do They Effect Us?
Firstly, they affect us by quantity. The more ACEs we experience, the worse our physical, mental and social health and wellbeing is. If you have experienced one ACE, you have an 86% chance of being subject to several. If you experience more than 4, your health and wellbeing is significantly affected. If you experience more than 6 then you have a 46 times higher chance of becoming an IV drug abuser, a 35 times higher chance of committing suicide and an overall 20 year decrease in life expectancy.
Secondly, the toxic stress levels significantly change the way in which our brains grow and function. This has a profound impact on our day to day functioning. ACEs are a massive cause of absenteeism from work, high cost to the health and social care system and highly predictive of time behind bars. That is why so many of us have complex relationships with things like food. Losing weight, for example, is not as straight forward as eating less, exercising more or ending up with a gastric band. Did you know that suicide rates are massively increased after bariatric surgery? By removing the ability to eat, the very thing that takes away or comforts the pain, we expose the underlying issue, but provide no healing into that void.
Thirdly, our bodies literally keep the score of the negative experiences. So, we become more likely to develop chronic pain, inflammatory conditions, heart disease, cancer and mental health issues.
Fourthly, the toxic stress actually alters the way our DNA works and therefore changes the genetic information that we pass onto future generations. As an example, domestic violence in pregnancy is predictive of child developmental issues and offspring of the survivors of the holocaust or genocide are far more likely to develop chronic anxiety. This highlights just how important our family history really is.
Fifthly, there are proven things we can do a) to help our brains learn how to cope in the midst of really difficult circumstances (resilience) and b) therapeutic interventions that can genuinely heal us.
Where Can We Find Help?
Here’s the thing – this is where the rubber hits the road.
Many of us, who have experienced difficult things in childhood/adolescence never talk about them. Sometimes that’s because we can’t remember the experiences – they happen to us before our memories fully form. But perhaps more frequently we bury them because we don’t want to talk about the deeply painful memories, we don’t know how to or we’re worried about what might happen to us, or the people who caused us the pain if we do. And how do you start a conversation like that anyway? What? Are you going to just blurt it out to someone? And what on earth will you do if you just start crying in the middle of a restaurant when you talk to your girlfriend/boyfriend about what happened to you? And what about all those complicated associated feelings of shame, guilt, fear, thoughts of rejection? So…..we keep the lid on….even though it’s to our own detriment because we don’t know how to bring it into the open.
And here in lies the starting place. It’s vital that we learn this in the world of health and social care, but actually we all need to hear this incredible truth. Various studies have shown that it takes 9-16 years for people to be able to talk about trauma/abuse they experienced, but most never do. Fraser and Read found that in their patients struggling with mental health issues, only 8% of them volunteered that they had experienced ACEs. However, when they were actually asked about this, 82% then talked about ACEs they had experienced. So? So, we find it almost impossible to talk about, but when someone asks us about what we have lived through, it takes the lid off the box, peels the sticky plaster off the deep wound and allows us to begin talking about our pain. And here’s something really remarkable……Felitti and Andra found in a study of 140000 people that simply by routinely asking all patients about ACEs, they saw a 35% decrease in visits to the GP and an 11% reduction in use of the Emergency Department!
What does that mean? It means that giving someone the chance to talk about their journey, what they have been through, breaking the cycle of shame, fear and rejection is, in and of itself, deeply healing! Knowing that you’re not a freak, knowing that it wasn’t your fault, knowing that it doesn’t mean that you yourself will become an abuser/alcoholic/poor parent and many more realisations can make a significant difference to a person’s wellbeing. Maybe it doesn’t have to wait for a GP’s surgery or a counsellor’s chair. Maybe, just maybe if we all care enough to ask each other deeper and more caring questions we can help to heal each other. I know this is true of my own journey and that of many of my friends.
But let’s not be naive. For some of us, the experiences we have had are so horrific that we are stuck in a moment and we can’t get out of it. And this is where good therapy really comes in. I wonder if we invested more in therapy and less in drugs to numb our pain, how much more healed we might be – perhaps more expensive in the short term, but overall the cost is far less, both for the individual and society as a whole. There is help available and it can take many forms. EMDR, Trauma Focussed-CBT, Bereavement Counselling and even things like working through a forgiveness process. Unfortunately, many of the waiting lists are very long, and private options are way too expensive for most people to afford.
So, Can We Change The Future?
You know that I believe together we can! But it’s not going to be easy, especially not in the context of our floundering social services, restrictive school curriculums, reduction in numbers of health visitors and school nurses, eye watering cuts to public health budgets and significantly stretched CAMHS and Adult Mental Health Teams. And I think we have to very real and honest about that, because if this is such a massive issue in our society (and the data and evidence is astounding) then we need, as Warren Larkin so eloquently argues, genuine commitment from leaders and organisations to shift towards a culture of learning and collaboration to bring about change.
Here are some things we need to do together:
1) Own up to what a massive issue this is.
2) We need to learn how to ask our friends better questions and care enough to listen to each other’s experiences and journeys because it is really hard to know how to start talking about ACEs, but is more possible when someone bothers to ask!
3) We need to recognise that by bottling things up, we do further harm to ourselves. Perhaps some of our complex addictive patterns of behaviour, our mental health issues, our physical pain and symptoms might well be linked to the ACEs we have experienced. So maybe we don’t need a life on painkillers, cigarettes or with a complex addictive behaviour patterns. Maybe we can find a way to deeper healing.
4) In health and social care, we need to adopt REACh (routine enquiry about adversity in childhood) – we need to change the way we take histories from patients and ask better questions. Remember that even by asking, it doesn’t open up scary and messy consultations that we don’t have time for, actually it opens up a therapeutic space which can massively alter how a person goes on to use the health service in the future.
5) We need to ensure schools are more vigilant to thinking that ‘naughty’ or ‘difficult’ children are actually highly likely to be in a state of hyper vigilance due to stressful things they are experiencing at home. Expecting them to ‘focus, behave and get on with it’, is not only unrealistic, it’s actually unkind. Simply recognising that kids might be having a really hard time, giving them space to talk about it with someone skilled, teaching them some resilience and finding a way to work with their parents/carers via the school nurse/social worker could make a lifetime of difference. It is far more important that our kids leave school knowing they are loved, with a real sense of self-esteem and belonging than with good SATS scores or GCSEs. The academic stuff can come later if necessary and we need to get far better at accepting this.
6) Parenting classes should not just be for the well-motivated or struggling. They should be for all of us – a routine part of antenatal care and alongside our children’s education and include help in dealing with previous ACEs, so they are not repeated for the next generation. Prevention is possible. And that means we need to learn to be a whole lot less judgemental and a great deal more open, honest, vulnerable and restorative with each other. One of my best memories of growing up, was going to a “foster home” for families that my mum used to work with and seeing parents being given the chance to learn how to love their kids, rather than have them taken off them. I know sometimes there is no choice, but helping people learn how to be family and to love and cherish their children is a really beautiful thing. When there has been generational abuse, it is is also of the upmost importance. I’m not saying that a child should never be removed, but we can hardly say that our care system is a rip-roaring success story.
7) We need to find a way of working with men and women in our prisons that enables them to find a way to healing and restoration, not retribution for what are often extremely complex stories.
8) We must learn from best practice around the world. For example, did you know that the vast majority of paediphiles begin offending at the age of 14?! Most of them do not go on to become prolific offenders, but the damage caused to the child they abuse is obviously significant. There is some amazing work now going on in Pennsylvania which has shown that you can actually prevent young men from becoming offenders in the first place. Simply by doing some better sex education, explaining to boys about testosterone, the urges they are having and who it is appropriate to perform sexual acts with; alongside creating a really safe space where they can come and talk about feelings they are having (a bit like AA – with no ridicule or judgement) – data shows that you can decrease the incidence of child sexual abuse. We have to learn from this kind of approach and find a better way of talking about difficult issues. Prevention IS possible!
9) We need to find a way to fund more psychological therapies and become much less reliant on drugs to numb the pain with the associated colossal bill paid to Big Pharma.
This is an area I am really passionate about. I am committing to keep this conversation alive, to ensure that we make a shift in our organisations towards a REACh approach, to find a deeper and more effective partnership with colleagues in education, social services and the police and to create space for more training and awareness for all our staff teams. I know how painful this conversation is, but I also know how utterly damaging it will be if we don’t change the future and prevent this from being a perpetual story through the generations. It is time for the hearts of the elders to turn to the children. Together we can reimagine the future. Together we can.
Here is a really helpful film:
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
So, the NHS is in another winter crisis.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crisis as:
1 A time of intense difficulty or danger.
‘the current economic crisis’
Mass noun ‘the monarchy was in crisis’
1.1 A time when a difficult or important decision must be made. As modifier ‘the situation has reached crisis point’
1.2 The turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.
Origin
Late Middle English (denoting the turning point of a disease): medical Latin, from Greek krisis ‘decision’, from krinein ‘decide’. The general sense ‘decisive point’ dates from the early 17th century.
A crisis is still a crisis, even if you see it coming. What is vital, as per Winston Churchill, is that a) we don’t waste this moment, but allow it to be a true tuning point and b) we don’t rush prematurely to actions to try and solve it, but ensure we look deep enough and far enough and then move towards collective steps for an altogether different kind of future.
I think there are some difficult and inconvenient truths that we need to face up to together. If we can do so, then we can move beyond sensational news cycles into co-producing something really exciting. Here are my incomplete thoughts about where we might want to think about starting:
- We need to get some perspective! One of the dangers of believing everything is bad is that we start to believe that the NHS is over. It is not over. It is 70 years old and it is transitioning, but it is not over! In the crisis we find ourselves in, let’s remember why the NHS is such an incredible thing and why its integration with social care is so vital. The Commonwealth Fund rates the NHS as the BEST healthcare system in the world, when it comes to equity, care and accessibility. However, our outcomes are significantly worse than that of our peers – there are some really important reasons for this, which we need to understand better. One of the major reasons is that our goals are so short term, that we cannot bring the long term changes to the health and wellbeing that we need – and this is caused by the way the NHS is run and the nature of our political cycles.
- We need to stop the boring, binary, partisan nonsense that is the political boxing match. It really is grow-up time when it comes to our arguments. There are some very different perspectives on why we’re in the crisis we’re in, what we might do about it and how we should go about those things. However, shouting our perspectives ever more loudly, whilst never encountering or deeply listening to the other perspectives in the room make it impossible for us to find an effective 3rd way forward together. We are well
versed in the blue vs red options, but let us be honest, please. Neither the reds nor the blues are wholly right, and neither is wholly wrong! It is absolutely OK to hold different perspectives, but the manner of our arguments is astoundingly pathetic. Whilst all this shouting goes on, there are several perspectives that are not being heard, important voices, those of the patient, the carer, the poor etc. We need to stop our reactionary, swing left, swing right steering of this great ship (and that’s not to say a centrist approach is best either!) and learn to have some humility. Humility starts with listening and being willing to change. This is being so beautifully demonstrated by the Rose Castle Foundation and Cambridge University through their work with the vastly differing world views of Conservative Islam, Judaism and Christianity and offers us much learning and hope for the NHS and indeed any other of our deeply held belief systems. Anyone willing to have better conversations and find a way forward? 
The maths simply doesn’t add up. We need some honesty. A few weeks ago, the head of NHSI Jim Mackey, said that by April the NHS will be in around £2.2billion of debt. That is a very conservative estimate. It is a mathematical impossibility to close wards and scale down the size of our hospitals at a time when district nursing numbers have reduced by 28% over the last 5 years and social care is on its knees AND sort out the deficit! We know what the direction of travel needs to be, but the equation is simply unworkable, due to time and workforce pressures.We need to understand the true scale of the problems we’re facing and be real about how much money is going into health and social care spending compared to what is actually needed.- The reason for this is that health and social care funding is becoming more costly and more complex. Our population is growing in size and people are living longer – this is great, on many levels (although we still need a much better conversation about death and why sometimes we keep people alive, when we could allow them to die well and peacefully). However, as we grow older, we develop more health conditions, and social needs, which require more costly treatments and packages of care, which we’re simply not accounting for, especially when we know the predictions of how our population will grow and age over the next 20 years.
- We therefore need to have a long term vision of how we want to build the most safe, excellent, effective, equitable, efficient, compassionate and kind health and social care system in the world whilst recognising in order to so, we will HAVE to make some upfront, BIG investments. It is simply impossible to have double austerity on health and social care and then believe we can do the transformational work necessary for the future change we need. Austerity has woken us up to the fact that there are some inefficient ways of working and some things we could definitely do more effectively in partnership. We’ve learnt that now. However, as a philosophy it is now defunct for where we need to go.
This means, we have to put significantly more money into the system now. Once we have done some more work on the vision and plans for the future (the 5 year forward view is too short and although sets us up a good trajectory, is not ambitious enough), we need to ensure there is a sufficient injection of cash (not removal of it) to make this possible. So, we have some options available to us. A) We could increase tax for everyone – something that 67% of our population seem to be willing to pay. B) We could close tax loopholes and ensure that companies like Amazon and Google pay the tax that is owed. C) We could also increase our GDP % spend on health and social care – remember, currently, we have one of the lowest % spend of any of the other OECD nations. Perhaps a combination of all of these things is necessary.
- Creating long term health and social care solutions means that we have to put population and public health as the foundation of the system. We know that prevention is better than cure. We know that if we promote health and wellbeing, disease will be far from us. The disinvestment in these areas and the over reliance on a very stretched and struggling community-voluntary-faith sector is a recipe for disaster. There is huge work to be done in deeply listening to and working with our communities to improve the health and wellbeing of everyone, using the best research, evidence and data available to us through our public health bodies in order to make this shift.
This means we need to continue to tackle the wider determinants of health and think radically about these things as being serious public health issues. This is how the city of Glasgow has gone about tackling knife crime and London has much to learn. We need to apply wisdom and learning to things like smoking, sugar, alcohol, pollution, drugs, road traffic accidents, domestic violence, suicide and adverse childhood experiences. We also need to develop a radically generous philosophy to the areas of job creation, housing, land rights and the care of the environment of which we are stewards not lords.- We have to take greater responsibility and care of the health and wellbeing of ourselves and of those around us. It is not possible for us to have a national health and social care system that is sustainable if we think we can live exactly how we want whilst thinking someone else will simply mop up the mess or pay the tab. Our sugar, food and alcohol consumption, lack of exercise, driving, smoking and drug habits are all areas where we do have to take greater responsibility. NHS staff need to lead by example here. They are also areas where government give those lobbies far too much power and where we need better legislation to help bring about change. It is a both/and not an either/or approach.
- We need to create a much more shared-care approach with patients, co-partner with patients to enable them to understand the conditions they live with so that they are able to self-manage/self-care more effectively and create community support groups.
- We need to use digital solutions to full effect. We need to widen the access to patients having their own online records, the sharing of data across the system and getting savvy with better apps and technology for the benefit of patients and communities.
- We need to change our expectations of what we believe our ‘rights’ are in terms of health and social care. As an example, people phone up a GP surgery and want to see a GP. But there are MANY other allied health and social care professionals who may be better placed to sort out the problem. However, a recent survey in Gosport showed that of the people who phoned up wanting to see their GP, only 9% of them actually needed to see their GP and the rest would have been dealt with more effectively by someone else. We need to get used to the fact that we don’t have enough GPs available for everyone to be able to see one every time they would like to, but there are other professionals who are equally able to help. Another example is that everyone wants to safeguard their local hospital and we tend to have a fixed belief that being in hospital when we’re ill is the best place for us. Actually, especially when we’re older we can receive just as good care at home or in a nursing home and being admitted to hospital adds very little benefit. However, in order to have smaller and therefore more affordable hospitals, we really do have to ensure we have the necessary infrastructure and staffing around community nursing, social care and General Practice. Currently this is not the case and it takes time and investment to grow this workforce.
- We need ensure we are training and recruiting the right skill mix of people for the right jobs. This means we need to think at least 20 years ahead with the predictive statistics we have available to us and do some proper workforce planning. We’re are far too short sighted. This will take financial investment now, as stated above, but if we get it right, will leave us with a far more effective and efficient living system in the future.
- Our medical, nursing and therapeutic school curriculums therefore need to ensure they are training students for the kind of future we need. We need a complete redesign of some of the curriculums and we need to change the way training is done. As part of this, we need to ensure we are raising good human beings, not just good professionals, with values, culture and great communication skills built into all of the process.
- We have to redesign the contracts, as unfortunately without this, some of the behaviour changes simply will not happen. The current contracts across health and social care are the very antithesis of what is needed. This will take some bravery and leadership, but it is time to grasp this nettle. Without this, we will behave perversely because the incentives driving the system and the nature of competition laws are detrimental to the collaborative future we need.
We can only do all of this together. This means our staring place in all of this is to own up to the fact that in all of the above, we simply don’t know. From the place of not knowing, we can ask great questions, bring our bits of expertise to the table and build a jigsaw. There is expertise in national and local government, but certainly not all the answers. There is expertise in the health and social care clinicians, practitioners and managers. There is expertise in our communities and with people who have lived experience of the various complex issues we face. It is only together that we can face the future. Let’s break out of our camps, our deeply entrenched belief systems and find a new way of dancing together. The future belongs to us all. Together we can.
