Just to be Clear – This is a Social Justice Issue

Following on from my blog earlier this week, I want to be really clear in what I am saying!

  1. The funding formula used in health and social care is weighted towards the wealthy and the well…therefore the north is worse off compared to the south…
  2. We are already at a major deficit in terms of health outcomes, in the north
  3. The cuts affecting northern county councils were deeper and harder – both in terms of public health and social services, with a profound knock on effect to the NHS – therefore the further ‘efficiency savings’ being requested of us have an even more detrimental effect
  4. The actual investment from the government as shown by the King’s fund is not 8-10billion as promised, but only 4.5billion
  5. If you take into account economic growth, inflation and population need, the ‘investment’ is actually a disinvestment…..
  6. On top of this is the fact, shown through HEE (Health Education England) that the NW in particular has a massively reduced investment in recruitment compared to other areas, which flies in the face of what the Nuffield Trust and King’s Fund have shown is needed in areas of higher deprivation and worse health outcomes
  7. Even if we save the £560m we’re being asked to as an STP, our deficit at 2021 is £804m

My argument is this: if the correct investment was made, the formula wasn’t weighted against us and we therefore received the correct allocation of resource according to the task ahead of us, we would actually probably be in surplus and could really make a difference – we are already doing loads of great stuff, but asking us to make bricks with no straw is beyond the pale.…..as it is, what we’re being asked to do may affect the health and wellbeing of our population negatively because we are already at such a deficit, before we start….

 

This is not a political issue – this IS a Social Justice issue.

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What Every Northerner Should Know About the North/South Health Gap

Everybody knows about the Gender Pay Gap – it’s well publicised and very much in the public domain for discussion – and too right! – How is this even still an issue? It it is quite simply wrong that women should earn less than men, any time, any place, end of discussion.

 

Well the same applies to the North-South Health Gap. What I find particularly irksome about this issue, is that people tend to roll their eyes and say that it’s all playing politics. No! No it isn’t. This is not about politics. This is about Social Justice!

 

It has been well documented that for over 40 years, the health of the people of the North of England has been significantly worse than that of people in the South and our life expectancy is worse. It is a complex issue and is highly linked to deprivation and poor housing conditions in the urban areas. The gap was narrowed during the early part of this century, but the health reforms made to the NHS have seen massive cuts to public health and social care budgets, disproportionately affecting the North. To make matters worse, the funding formula that is used by the Department of Health to determine how and where money should be spent, deliberately favours the rich and the well and and that means that head for head of population, the North does considerably worse than the South in terms of how much resource is made available. This is even true of how many staff are given proportionally to the North compared to the South. This is just ludicrous and is simply not fair. How can it make any sense at all to spend more money in areas where the population is more healthy and people have a significantly better overall life expectancy already? Are we to believe that Southerners are more important than Northerners, just as the pay gap would imply that men are more important than women?

 

The savings being asked of the Northern STPs (Sustainability and Transformation Plans) at a time in which we are already struggling with the huge cuts previously mentioned, and starting from a significant deficit in terms of our health outcomes, is meaning that the health and wellbeing of the people of the North will suffer further. I am not suggesting that we can not work more efficiently and collaboratively within the public services, nor am I suggesting that the people of the North do not need to take greater responsibility for our own health (although it is well known, that when you are more deprived, you are less likely to have the mental wellbeing to make positive choices about your own health). What I am saying is this: whatever the budget allocations may be; let them be fair!

 

Yes, it is time for us to tackle the health problems across the North, and we will do so together as the people. Maybe we don’t have carte blanche any more and have to reassess what we think might be available in terms of health care provision. But what we would like is to be able to make this journey by starting on a basis of equality with the South. No more North-South divide. No more unfair funding calculations. No more political games. Social-Health Justice for all, now.

 

For further information, you can read:

https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/37/1/34/1556643/Grim-up-North-or-Northern-grit-Recessions-and-the

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/field/field_publication_file/inequalities-in-life-expectancy-kings-fund-aug15.pdf#page2

http://councilportal.cumbria.gov.uk/documents/s50047/STP%20April%20submission%20for%20Lancashire%20and%20South%20Cumbria.pdf?nobdr=2

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Understanding Brexit (and Trump)

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about how the Brexit and Trump campaigns were so successful. (I owe most of ths thought process to a very inspiring session about our shadow selves from Paul and Angie Woods, during a weekend focussed on the Enneagram). What was it, apart from the arguments made and the general feeling of discontent that appealed so deeply to the national psyches of the United Kingdom and the United States respectively?

 

I think there is some real wisdom to be gleaned from the Enneagram about the corporate personalities of the UK and USA, which might help us to understand why the majority voted as they did and how we might want to understand and embrace our corporate mind-sets as we look to develop a positive politics of peace for the future.

 

Richard Rohr has done some helpful work, as have others, on the personality types or dominant psyches of various nations. I agree with his perspective that Great Britain has a Type 6 personality and the USA is of Type 3. The root struggle for a type 6 personality is the need to be secure – therefore any campaign based on fear (of not having enough Sovereignty, of not having control of our money, of the “other” people who keep coming here and taking away our sense of national identity) touches on our deepest need and struggle. For a type 3 personality, the root struggle is the need to succeed and so the promise to ‘make America great again’ strikes the chord that tugs on the heart strings.

 

enneagram-3-6-9-healthSo, focusing in on the UK (maybe some thoughts on the lovely USA another time), if we are to shift the political discourse towards something more healthy for the future, we need to learn to listen to the part of us that feels the need to be safe. We need to understand the ‘shadow’ part of our corporate personality that is anxious and fearful, admitting to ourselves what drives our thoughts and actions. When a Type 6 personality is not in a healthy place, they will begin to regress into a Type 3 pattern of thinking. So, the underlying drive to be safe becomes the need to get noticed and be special. So, post-brexit, some of which was about the need to be safe, we find our politicans trying to re-assert our Soverignty and our ‘Greatness’. Only a couple of weeks ago, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was declaring on the radio that we don’t realise quite how the rest of the world sees us. Apparently, they admire us and think we need to continue showing great leadership in the world. We continue to believe this about ourselves, that we are very special and have a vital role which the rest of the world needs us to play. I wonder if we actually asked the rest of the world whether or not this is true, they might laugh in our face, pat us on the head and gently remind us that the world has moved on, but maybe we have not.

enneagram-6

 

Great Britain, as a Type 6 corporate personality, has an innate sense of loyalty. After the NHS, our Royal Family reamins the most popular part of our national identity, according to recent surveys. We carry a sense of being ‘loyal subjects’ who ‘do our duty for Queen and Country’. We are reliable, dependable, a safe pair of hands. But when our security is threatened, when we feel we are losing control, when we are told again and again that our borders are not safe, we begin to seek our security externally. We shut others out, we stop trusting others to make rules we don’t feel we have enough control over, build more weapons and ensure our finances work primarily for us. This then leads us towards a tendancy for workoholism, and so then we cut the nation state, drive people back into work, making an argument that it is the ‘lazy poor’ who are in part to blame for some of our mess. We become much more image conscious of our perceived role in the world and go on a charm offensive to remind people just how special we really are. But let me just state this: this is not a very healthy way to behave or live in the world.

 

I know this isn’t going to sound ‘Great’, but it is my perspective that ‘Great Britain’ left the European Union out of a place of fear, which has drawn us to try and re-discover our ‘special’ place in the world. During the referendum, some of our deepest corporate insecurities were touched on, and rather than see them for what they are, speak to them comfortingly and confront them within ourselves, we were enticed into age old patterns of behaviour which acually prevent us becoming the true gift amongst nations that we could be. You see, in my opinion, the invitation to the UK was (and actually continues to be) this: Firstly, let’s admit it – we’re scared. There is too much going on in the world that makes us feel out of control. We need a sense of comfort and security and we’re not sure how to get that anymore, without shutting our borders and taking back control over our ‘own laws and money’. This is exactly why we need the friendship and help of our neighbours! Secondly, we need to hear the call to us that we are loved, actually (!) and we can therefore allow ourselves to be still and know that safety is not truly found in better barriers and bigger weapons but in the risk that is relationship, vulnerability and being known…..that somehow underneath everything are the ‘everlasting arms’. Thirdly, this allows us to find a new place in ‘just being’, knowing we have inherent value, becoming truly loayal friends to the rest of Europe and the World, without the need to re-establish our status as the ‘Great One’.

 

Yes, the media holds an enormous amount of power, but it was the appeal to our deepest needs, a root struggles that enevitably lead to Brexit. Those, who felt the pull to remain, needed to speak to those very same issues, whilst calling us not towards our ‘3’ need to be Great and Successful, but towards our ‘9’. We must awaken the imagination of these amazing isles to a new place in the world, that is not about reassesrting our own name as Great, but finding our place as a nation of peace, building an altogether different kind of future in which our work does not look to protect our own future and rights, but the future hope of everyone everywhere. The UK has some incredible gifts and we can be a gift within and among the nations. We need a world in which each nation knows it’s inherent value and each can take their place amongst the nations to build a future for generations to come, in which we live in peace. We need to reimagine our place in the world. We need to tell a new and more ancient story. In order to do so we MUST face up to our own shadow, otherwise we will continue to act out of it and be the very antithesis of what we would, in our heart of heats, love to become.

 

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Here we go round the NHS Mulberry Bush!

One of my favourite songs as a 5 year old was ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’. I’ve been involved with the NHS for 17 years now and every winter, we do this same dance around Emergency Departments and the total mess that surrounds hospital admissions, discharges and an ever growing list of missed targets. Unfortunately, it no longer applies only to winter. It really is an absolute shambles and the problems are only too obvious. In this blog, I plan to outline them, but hopefully move away from the classic “who’s to blame” arguments and push through towards thinking about solutions…..none of which are easy, but neither are they rocket science!

 

So, here is a list of problems:

  1. We have an increasingly elderly population, who have increasingly complex health needs. You might not think this really means that much, but it has a profound impact on how long someone might need to stay in hospital and the kind of care they might require both in terms of social care and health care in the community. A recent report by the King’s Fund showed the extra strain on the health service due to a rise in people having multiple conditions is substantial. (http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/pressures-in-general-practice)
  2. Funding cuts in social care and ‘efficiency savings’ in the NHS are having a terrible impact on hospitals and communities alike. If, as in our locality, wards have to be closed in order to balance the books, this has a massive knock on into several areas. If you close wards, it means the hospital fills up more quickly. If the hospital is full, then where do the patients who need to go into the hospital wait? The answer is in the ED. If they are waiting in the ED, then there becomes a back log of patients who cannot be seen and there will be an automatic failure to see, treat and admit or discharge patients within the 4 hour target window, which then leads to a negative rating for the hospital under CQC and pressure from on high to ‘do something about it’. But that’s just it….what can be done? Can people just be discharged home when they are unwell? – This is happening increasingly and then they end up back in hospital the next day in a worse state. The ED departments get the blame, but there is precious little they can do. At the other end of the line are people waiting to get home, but due to the deep cuts in social care, there simply isn’t the provision to put that care in place and so they are stuck. A lack of joined up computer systems between primary and secondary care makes this even more difficult. And even where patients could be cared for at home by community teams, the correct investment has not been made in this key area, hospital staff have not been trained to work in alternative environments (and believe me, they really are different) and so the teams we need in the community simply aren’t in place in many towns, cities and rural communities.
  3. There is a lack of information flow about patients and the care packages they already have in place and so a massive amount of time is wasted due to poor communication.
  4. The ‘A&E brand’ or ED, as it is now called is incredibly strong. Everybody knows it. And so people use it totally inappropriately, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes desperation, sometimes laziness or convenience and sometimes apathy to the strain it places on services. We either have to work with this or keep on encouraging people not to use the ED. Unfortunately studies from the USA and Canada show that the more you negatively advertise the ED, the more people will use it. The King’s Fund explain with excellent clarity some of the complexities involved. What’s going on in A&E? The key questions answered (http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/urgent-emergency-care/urgent-and-emergency-care-mythbusters?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_term=socialshare)
  5. Our residential and nursing home sector is in absolute disarray and in some areas of the country they are run like cartels, holding hospital trusts and county councils to ransom in terms of affordability.
  6. We are still unwilling to have a difficult and frank discussion about our attitude to death and how we often keep people alive for years, when we could allow them to die naturally and peacefully (I’ve blogged on this emotive subject previously).

 

So what happens is we have a circular blame culture in which everybody will blame somebody else, but nobody will take responsibility and so we will continue our dance around the mulberry bush! But if you have just a tiny bit of faith, you can say to this mulberry bush, “Be uprooted and be thrown into the Sea”. Where systems become oppressive and toxic,  we must pluck up the complex root structure and find a new way.

 

Without real commitment from the government to invest rather than cut at this crucial time of transition, spending now to make huge savings in the long term, we might just continue this dance ad infinitum. The solutions cannot deliver change by the next parliament, but the transition must be honoured as vital and therefore allowed to happen over the next 10-20 years. We need a whole systems approach and it needs to involve the following (we’re trying this in Morecambe Bay):
Firstly, we need the development of Integrated Care Communities (ICCs). ICCs are geographically based, multidisciplinary teams, led and co-ordinated by a GP and a nurse but also include the vital mix of the fire service, police, mental health teams, social services, community matrons/long term conditions nurses, district nurses, community therapy teams and representatives of 3rd sector organisations. The idea of these teams to to keep care closer to home, share information, prevent admissions to hospital, but where admissions happen, ensure they happen in a coordinated way, bringing people back home as quickly as possible. We already have some great stories emerging here of this working really successfully. These teams have the potential to change the modus operandi and bring a culture change to how care is delivered. 
However, these teams will fail for the same three key reasons the NHS is currently on the ropes. Resource, recruitment and IT. 

These teams will be managing complex care in the community. With not too much extra funding, GPs and the care coordinators could do some incredibly effective work, but right now, general practice is at full stretch and so convincing community teams to take on this work will not be straight forward. This resource would be best invested in two areas – recruitment of staff, or retraining of staff and secondment of them from the hospital setting into the community and the strengthening of social care teams, (which to my mind are more accountable and more effective when under the same management as the NHS and provided by the state). The investment in it would also not be huge but it does involve some upfront cash. If each GP/Care Coordinator could have a laptop with Emis Web imbedded in it, with full access to their patients notes, they could go into the hospital setting once a week, do a ward round of their patients, who they know far better than the hospital teams and get them home. With the right team investment in the community this initiative would literally save millions of bed days and save an enormous amount of resource. But the better and more important benefit will be for patients themselves However, there is a warning for the government. In order for this to be effective and have the desired impact, it MUST be double-run, rather than expecting this to be done on top of what is already the status quo. The capacity is simply not in the system, but it could so easily be and this could be utterly transformational.
Secondly, the government must reverse the perverse cuts to funding. It simply bad mathematics to think that you can shrink the size of a hospital and shrink the social care provision available in the community at the same time. We need a serious reinvestment in social care. A strong and well paid social sector will bring more people into work, which btw builds a stronger economy.

Thirdly, we need to ensure all people in residential and nursing care, and those living with complex health conditions in the community have detailed care plans in place to avoid hospital admissions, except when absolutely necessary AND in line with the persons own wishes.

Fourthly, we must co-create urgent care strategies, not designed from on high, but collaboratively between ED departments, mental health teams, the police, GPs, community nursing teams and social services. If we cannot undo fifty years of public mindset about the ED, then let’s work with this rather than against it. We need more people recruited to work in the emergency setting and the pay needs to reflect the complexity and unsocial nature of the work.

Fifthly, we must stop the nonsense around data sharing, make patient records available to patients themselves and front end our EDs, Acute Medical and Surgical Units, Outpatient Departments with the same systems as we find in the GPs, all of whom should agree to share their records. In our area this would be with Emis Web, a very straight forward system to use. It would mean far faster diagnostics, more joined up, effective care for patients and investment now by the government across the UK would save them plenty of money within just a few years. It would also make data gathering, audit and governance easier and safer. The idea of spending literally millions of pounds on apps that can input data straight into patients notes, before we have this far more vital infrastructure in place is quite frankly ridiculous!
Lastly, we must work creatively with communities on public health strategies that can have a lasting impact and so stave off the growing health crises we see emerging for the future.

I don’t know about you, but to me the dance around this mulberry bush has become pretty boring, a colossal waste of time and energy and so in my opinion, we should quite simply stop it and do something different. The solutions are right in front of us. Will the government have the guts to stop what they are doing and make the right investments now for the sake of the health and wellbeing of the population at large and the health and social care system as a whole. They might not get the glory at the next election, but in ten years time, we will see that the right choices were made for the good of all. 
 

 

 

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Making a Key Distinction in the NHS

There are two different narratives that are shaping the debate around the NHS at present. They are different stories, but they are becoming dangerously intertwined. I want to highlight the two stories and make a clear distinction between the two.

 

The first story is that there are some ways in which the NHS needs to be more efficient, work more smartly, integrate its services more effectively, cut some unnecessary waste, be more collaborative and ensure that the service it provides is as affordable as possible in a manner that is safe, learning, compassionate and continually improving. Some of this involves working with communities to help us live in a way (individually and corporately) that helps us to be more healthy and well, taking some strain from the system. It also involves some restructuring and rearranging of services to enable them to deliver care in a more streamlined way. This is a true story.

 

There is another story that is told that sounds like it has some similarities, but it is not the same story. This is the story that tells us the NHS is unaffordable, that it is failing and that we need parts of it to be privatized for it to survive. This is based on an idea that we have to balance our books, cut our cloth, tighten our belts and ‘live within our means’. This story is not true. It is not true because no country has ever lived within its means. Countries are nothing like households. Households are very simple. The economies of nation states are not. Households do not have banks in their back gardens that print money when things go wrong. Households do not give special privileges to rich friends, making life easier for them, whilst treating poorer friends like servants, taking away things they need and telling them are lazy and need to work harder, whilst blaming their problems on other friends who have moved into the area aka immigrants. Cutting public services and seeing the gap between the rich and poor grow ever wider whilst taking away the welfare that helps families in genuine need, cutting the services available to help them (pretending these are efficiency savings and not cuts) is a choice being made by our politicians. We are told there is no other choice, but this is not a true story. The NHS could be better funded (it is currently one of the most under funded health care systems in the entire developed world) and we could choose to manage the money of the country in an altogether different way! The NHS is affordable and the first story is helping to make this more true, but it needs greater investment, not the removal of vital services. Do not confuse the two stories.

 

 

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