The Future NHS and Care System – PCNs as Building Blocks

I recently wrote a blog about reimagining health and care in this apocalyptic moment. In this post, I want to put a bit more flesh on the bones of what that might actually look in the context of the NHS, here in the UK and particularly, England.

 

Let me just make a few statements about where I’m at when thinking about future health and care:

I believe in a publicly funded and provided national health and care service, paid for through fair taxation.

I believe that health and care should be available to all people, equally, regardless of ability to pay.

I believe in locally led health and care systems, embedded in local communities.

I believe prevention is better than cure and we need to get up stream and stop people falling in the river in the first place.

I believe creating great working cultures enables teams to flourish and brings out the best in people. I know right now that our health and care workforce is feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. We can’t keep working under the huge burdens of constantly changing goal posts, key performance indicators and heavily mandated targets. The wellbeing of those who work in this sector has been overlooked for too long and the stress levels caused by the sheer pace and volume of work are not acceptable.

I believe there is systemic and ingrained racism in our communities and within the NHS and even though I consider myself to be ‘woke’ about this, as a privileged, white, male, there is still so much work for me and us to do, both internally and externally in order to break the curse of white supremacy. It is simply not enough to say ‘black lives matter’ – our words are cheap unless we do not confront internalised narratives and change society together, from the inside-out through truth and action.

I believe our economic system is no longer fit for the 21st century and am so grateful for the reimagining of what economics is for.

I believe the role of government needs to radically change to be much more empowering of local communities, with appropriate frameworks to support this. We are seeing the mess of centralised control, with unchecked and wasteful investment in the private sector, rather than local community empowerment in this current Covid-19 pandemic.

I believe communities are able to self-organise phenomenally well, as we have seen throughout this pandemic and should be supported to do so more through a much more participatory and relational politics.

I believe that any health and care service should promote overall wellbeing by paying extra special attention to:

 

  • instating women fully and equally
  • prioritising children
  • advocating for the poor and breaking down health inequalities especially through challenging stigma (Very grateful to Imogen Tyler for her great work on this)
  • welcoming ‘strangers’ (by this I particularly mean the way we treat staff from overseas and how we care for refugees and asylum seekers)
  • reintegrating humanity with the environment (e.g. by getting back to basics of nutrition and sustainable food)
  • restoring justice to prisoners (metaphorical and real)
  • healing the sick – through both slow and fast medicine
  • ensure the honouring the elderly In how they are cared for

 

So……(!)……How do we take the best thinking around health and care systems and make it real and practicable in the NHS and Care System? Firstly, I suggest that we need to take the hierarchical, pyramidal system and simply flip it upside down. Let’s begin at the local level, as the foundations stones of a reimagined health and care system and build from there. With this we need to take seriously what Simon Parker is calling for in a rethink of what government exists for.

 

Within the health and care system though, we don’t another fresh reorganisation. We have some good things we can play around with. We just need to stretch our thinking a bit more and permission some creative, entrepreneurial experiments and we can see something really exciting emerge. Primary Care Networks are a good basic building block, which take the best of clinical leadership, and when done properly, combine it with local communities to build local health and wellbeing. They cause General Practice to work together more collaboratively, use the best of available data to map the issues a population are facing and have the flexibility to begin working differently. They are not perfect, and in my opinion, need some adaptation, if they are going to enable the tackling of health inequalities, social injustice and true community empowerment.

 

Firstly, they need more time. The phrase ‘at pace and scale’, used all too often in various management discussions In the health sector, is the antithesis of what the NHS needs right now. PCNs need time to build stronger relationships with their local communities, really listen to what their community are experiencing and build local solutions WITH their communities through co-design and co-creation. The constant onslaught of new targets, new measurement tools, new initiatives, all to be delivered by, well, yesterday, are completely counterproductive to the transition and revolution that community medicine needs to make. The current work load in General Practice is unsafe and unsustainable and is a byproduct of the consumerist attitude we have taken towards healthcare as a commodity. PCNs need time and will fail otherwise! This must be created for them.

 

Secondly, PCNs need to look at alternative and more sustainable models for the future. Currently, PCNs are very much built around General Practice at the core, and this makes alot of sense in many ways. However, here in Morecambe Bay, we have a building block called ‘Integrated Care Communities’ (ICCs), which pre-date PCNs by some five years. I believe we need to see a melding of the best bits of both, with a much wider and more integrated team within and around the PCN model. The traditional GP partnership model, though highly successful and desirable in so many ways, continues to build a model with the GP, primarily as the leader. I am a GP Partner myself – there are some huge benefits to such a model, especially often through great altruism and genuine community care. One of the difficulties facing primary care, as it stands though, is that few ‘future GPs’ want to become partners, preferring a ‘salaried’ approach and the issues facing primary care may, perhaps require a different kind of (and perhaps more socially just) economic model. I suggest that PCNs may want to explore the highly effective and entrepreneurial model of Social Cooperatives. Such models have proved highly successful in places like The Netherlands and New Zealand, provide greater sustainability, better collaborative working and more exciting opportunities. Drawing on the work of the economists, Spencer Thompson, Kate Raworth, Mariana Mazzucato, Katherine Trebeck (and others) I can see that a social co-operative model of PCNs, given trust and freedom to experiment, by either government or commissioners, could really remodel health and care at a local level, around genuine community need, as set out by Hilary Cottam in Radical Help. We could see the creation of locally led (and owned) community health and care services (perhaps even including care homes, who are still very poorly treated as we have seen through this crisis), creating healthy communities from pre-conception to death through asset based community development and participatory, democratic processes. A social cooperative model allows all people working together in a geography to be part of the same ‘system‘, rather than the current clumsiness of multiple ‘sovereign organisations’ tripping over each other, whilst creating similar community roles, bespoke to each employer’s whim. However, a cooperative model may not work for all organisations, like the police and fire-service (I’m happy to be convinced otherwise) and so building relationships, sharing milk and working having regular check-ins and multidisciplinary team meetings will continue to be important.

 

The possibilities at the local level are endless. PCNs would be able to prioritise a much more proactive, preventative model of health and care, employing smaller but more relational and therefore more effective and sustainable teams, embedded in local communities. They would form fantastic partnerships with local schools, co-designing a curriculum that creates positive mental and physical health, connecting young people more into their community and environment whilst being trauma-informed and compassionate in their leadership. Midwives, health visitors, social workers, community Paediatricians and mental health practitioners could form part of the core team and all work from the same geographical space with IT systems that actually talk to each other. Community care of the elderly would be more joined up, with care of the elderly physicians leading their own care of nursing home patients, supported by specialist nurse practitioners, along with, of course the incredible 3rd sector. It might be that some consultants, e.g. Rheumatologists, Dermatologists and Psychiatrists could belong to a cohort of PCNs, even employed by them, and therefore create a greater sense of belonging to a particular set of communities and they would also be able to work with communities more proactively through workshops, group consultations and education settings. Teams could flex and grow to suit the needs of a community, with the economic model set up to enable rather than constrain the flourishing of such initiatives. The social cooperatives could also form community land trusts which could begin to tackle various wider social determinants of poor health, including issues like housing, homelessness and access to green spaces. These cooperatives could ensure a living wage and persuade local businesses to get more involved in the area of health and wellbeing and even invest in the kind of initiatives that would create work in the green sector for local people. Why shouldn’t local health communities be involved in social change, when these issues affect the health of their communities so vastly?

 

I see local leadership teams (what we call Integrated Care Partnerships or ICPs), made up of PCN Directors, Local Government Officials, CVFS CEOs, The Police, Fire Service and Hospital Chiefs continuing to take the role of looking at a wider Population, made up of a group of PCNs and support them in tackling health inequalities, taking a servant leadership approach to empower them to succeed as much as possible. Primarily this group would be about permissioning, enabling, encouraging, holding space for learning and development, holding true to values and using data to facilitate excellence in practice. Relationships and trust will be the core ‘operating framework’ to enable PCNs to fully flourish.

 

The Integrated Care System (ICS) Leaders then need to take a similar approach with each ICP in their domain, giving as much power away as possible and taking a collaborative approach across a wider geography to learn from each other and encourage best practice and through the sharing of stories and success. It’s this kind of nurturing and facilitative leadership that will enable each ICP and PCN to flourish. Hospitals will naturally become more focused on acute care, and areas, like Oncolgy, as consultants become more aligned to the PCNs with which they primarily work (obviously this does not apply to all specialities, which is why an ICS can take more of an overall look at the hospital requirements for the population it serves). The role of the national NHS England and NHS Improvement teams then becomes the servant of all, the enabler and the holder of core values. Rather than a central command and control structure, it gives itself to a love-poured out model, creating cultures of joy right through the health and care system. Yes, it sets some priorities, but does so by listening to what communities around the nation are saying. So right now that would include asking PCNs to prioritise tackling systemic and ingrained racism, health inequalities and childhood trauma, in collaboration with their communities. They will take the best of international experience and learning, share that widely and reimagine the NHS as global trend-setter for how we create deep peace and wellbeing in our communities, enabling us to become good ancestors of the future. A radical, revolutionary but entirely practical refocusing of the NHS and Care System from the bottom-up is entirely possible. There is almost no remodelling needed, simply a change in focus and culture. It requires PCNs and the communities they serve to get on an do it together, disregarding that which prevents them. If they do this, they will find that everything they need will follow them and their light will shine brightly.

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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:

 

  1. 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.
  2. 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?
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.

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Lessons From Helsinkii

Tweet I’m just returning from 36 hours with the Coalition of Partners for Europe, as part of the World Health Organisation. There were a further 2 days of conversations to occur, but I needed to get back to Morecambe Bay. I have learned so much during my short time with this amazing group of people, [Continue Reading …]

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