Tag: solutions focussed

Solutions for the NHS Workforce Crisis

This week, the Kingsfund, one of the most respected think-tanks on health and social care in the UK declared that the current NHS staffing levels are becoming a ‘national emergency’.

 

The latest figures have been published by the regulator, NHS Improvement, for the April to June period.

 

They showed:

■   11.8% of nurse posts were not filled – a shortage of nearly 42,000

■   9.3% of doctor posts were vacant – a shortage of 11,500

■   Overall, 9.2% of all posts were not filled – a shortage of nearly 108,000

 

NHS vacancies a ‘national emergency’

 

This is having a profound impact on staff who are working in the NHS now, with low morale, high stress levels, increasing mental health problems and people leaving the profession (either to go over seas, where pay and work-life balance is considerably better) or retire early. 

 

Increasing the number of doctors, nurses and midwives (all with considerable debt, mind you!), by 25% over the next 5 years is welcome, but it doesn’t solve the problem now, and it is unlikely to be enough, even then!

 

But, let’s take a solutions focussed approach. What can we do now? I think there are a few things we need to consider:

 

  1. I can understand how frustrating it is for the public to find that waits are longer to receive much needed care. When we’re anxious or worried about our own heath or that of a loved one, we are understandably at a position of higher stress. However, this staffing crisis is not of the making of the nurses, doctors and other health professionals who work long hours every day to provide the best health care they can. So, it’s really important that as a country, we treat our NHS staff with kindness, gratitude and respect. The current abuse of NHS staff is making the job even harder and really making people not want to come to work. And that means we also need to make complaints in a way that is perhaps a bit more compassionate or understanding towards people who are working under high stress situations. It is important that we learn from mistakes, but complaints have a huge impact on staff and can hugely affect their confidence, even when they are dealt with in a very compassionate way by those in leadership. 
  2. We need to ensure that we use our appointments appropriately. Yes – sometimes, we have to wait a while to see our GP, but if we get better in the mean time, we really don’t need to be keeping the appointment! And missing appointments costs us all so much time and energy and makes those waiting lists ever longer. If we value our health system, we need to either keep appointments, or take responsibility to cancel them.
  3. We need to take an urgent look at the working day of our NHS staff and work out how we build more health and wellbeing breaks into their days. We need staff to have space to connect, keep learning, be active, be mindful and take appropriate breaks. This means senior leadership teams getting the culture right, when the pressure is on and the stakes are high. 
  4. We need to get smarter with digital and enable patients to make better and more informed choices about their own care and treatment, with better access to their notes. In this way, we waste less time and empower people to become greater experts in the conditions with which they live everyday. There are great examples of where this is happening already. It isn’t rocket science and can be rolled out quite easily. It’s good to see some announcements about this from the new health secretary Matt Hancock MP, but we need to make sure the deals and the products are the right ones. It’s also vital, when it comes to digital solutions that Matt Hancock listens to his colleague and chair of the health select committee, Dr Sarah Wollaston MP, in being careful what he promotes and prioritises.
  5. We need to be thinking NOW about the kind of workforce we are going to need in the next 2-3, and 5-10 years and we need to get the training and expectations right now! There is no point designing our future workforce based on our current needs. Rather, we need expert predictive analysis of the kind of future workforce we will need, in line with the ‘10 year plan’ and begin to grow that workforce now. If it’s healthcoaches we need to work alongside GP practices, then let’s get them ready, if it’s community focussed nursing teams, then let’s adjust the training programmes. This kind is vital and must influence what happens next.
  6. We need to stop putting pressure on NHS staff to deliver that which is currently undeliverable without causing significant stress to an already overstretched workforce. By this I mean centrally driven schemes, such as the intended roll out of GPs working 8-8, 7 days a week. Maybe it’s an aspiration for the future if we can sufficiently reimagine the workforce, but it’s not a priority now and isn’t the answer to the problems we’re facing.
  7. We need to stop the cutting of social care in local governments, and ensure that central funding flows to where it needs to be, to ensure the allied support services are present in local communities to work alongside NHS colleagues in getting the right care in the right place at the right time. This is the single biggest cause of our long ED waits and our problems with delayed discharges from hospital. It isn’t rocket science. It’s the reality of cuts to our social care provision, which have been too deep and this needs to be reversed.

 

Personally, although it is an option, I feel uncomfortable about a ‘recruitment drive’ from overseas, as it is very de-stabilising to health care systems in more deprived parts of the world when we do that. I think there are some win-win initiative we could develop pretty quickly that could also form part of our international development strategy.

 

In summary, we need to treat our NHS staff with kindness, look after their wellbeing, use our services appropriately, use digital technology with wisdom and not for political gain, redesign and start building the workforce of the future now, stop undeliverable initiatives and ensure the right funding and provision of services through social care which means central government funding back into local government. It won’t solve everything, but it will go along way towards giving us a more sustainable future to the NHS.

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Continuously Learning Health Systems


Learning requires humility. It requires us to accept that we don’t know everything, that we get it wrong sometimes, make mistakes and need to own up to them so that we don’t do the same thing again. Learning is a vital part of all we do in health and social care, if we are to create truly safe, sustainable, compassionate and excellent services. But humility, although vital, is not enough on its own. There are things we need to put in place to ensure our organisations are continually learning, and not only so but that we actually implement our learning and incorporating it into new ways of working so that we change as a result.

The IHI and Allan Frankel have come up with a really helpful and pretty straight forward framework which enables us to do this. It requires 3 basic ingredients:

 

1) Leadership commitment

2) Individual responsibility

3) A shared learning culture for quality and safety

 

Leadership is absolutely vital in setting the right structures and support in place for learning to take place. It requires:

 

-transparency with the public, patients and staff

-vulnerability about weaknesses

-openness about what is being learned and what is changing as a result

-ensuring we are learning with and from our patients not just within our clinically teams. (Some of the most powerful learning we have done in Morecambe Bay has been from women using our maternity services. Our attitudes, communication skills and expertise have all improved dramatically as a result).

-commitment to the psychological safety of staff in developing a culture in which no question is too stupid and no concern is dismissed

-genuine care for each member of staff, creating a culture in which every person can be mentored, coached and encouraged

-time given and protected in which learning can be fostered

 

Personal Responsibility

Who are you?

In my role as a coach/mentor or trainer I have found that we have become far too obsessed with ensuring that people have the right skills but not necessarily paying too much attention to who people are, what their character is like, what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they are developing as a human being. Our medical/nursing and other clinical schools are filled with people eager to learn but who often have no idea about who they are and who, not what they would like to become. Knowing who you are as a person, hugely affects your clinical practice and we do not give it any way near enough attention. I am personally a huge fan of the Enneagram. For me it has been transformational to understand as a type 7, not only what my root need is (to avoid pain) what my root struggle is (gluttony) how I do under stress (become a falsely happy control freak) but also, what my invitation is (towards sober joy and deeper understanding), how to become a more healthy version of me and therefore a better gift to my family, my team and all the people I’m trying to serve. It has helped me to recognise when I’m doing well and when I’m not and to understand how to bring my core strengths to the fore whilst also recognising where I need discipline and boundaries to function from a more healed place. We each have a responsibility not just to be good at stuff, but to be good at being us. And  being us is more than just knowing how we function (e.g. ENFP in Myers-Briggs) but to get below the surface to the core of what makes us tick, that makes us human. Knowing who we truly are enables us to be better, kinder, more humble, genuine, compassionate people, who put aside the need to beat others down and learn to appreciate them so much more. When you really know the team you are working with, they become your friends, you understand the little idiosyncratic things about them with a whole lot more patience and you can also challenge them when they are not behaving in a way that is conducive to good care and you can also receive that challenge back when you are out of line. I wish that we were more interested in caring about who we are rather than only in what we can do. This has got to be a part of the culture of joy I have blogged about previously.

How are you?

Personal responsibility beckons us to be more honest with ourselves and others about how we’re doing emotionally/physically/mentally. It has been a transformational practice in our team to simply check-in with each other and talk about where we’re at. In this way, we can carry each other when needed and treat each other with kindness and compassion. But our individual agency, must also cause us to recognise when we are at a wall/ceiling/limit personally or professionally. We must simply own up when we don’t know something or are out of our depth or need help. We cannot pretend to be able to have a competency that we don’t have. We need to be self-aware and humble enough to accept when we don’t know something or have become unwell and ensure that we take it upon ourselves to find out or get the help we need. This is learning to have an internal, rather than an external locus of control. An external locus, always looks elsewhere for the answer. An internal locus takes responsibility to find out and keep learning. We need to develop a core value, that learning is really really important and we will prioritise ensuring that we keep making time to do so, through whatever form that takes, especially reflective practice. Yes there is some dependency on supportive structures and time being given, but there is also that sense of motivation that comes from within that we take ourselves and our roles seriously. It’s one of the reasons why I’m such a fan of a combination of problem-based learning and a solutions-focussed approach. If we do this ourselves and foster it in our teams, the care we provide will be beyond stellar!

Why are you Here?

We talk about the law of two feet in our team. You are responsible to know why you are here, or if you need to be somewhere else. That might even mean a job change, but more often than not it means having some good boundaries, knowing whether or not you really need to be at a certain meeting or somewhere else, if you should be doing what you are or if you need to ensure other things get the right focus. And what about yourself? Have you taken time to eat well, stay well hydrated, exercise, sleep well, maintain health in your relationships? In teams that care for each other we need to help each other to know why we are there and why we are important.

 

A Shared Learning Culture

 

It’s amazing to me that so many of our learning environments are still so teacher-based. Adult education is so much more empowering than this and it’s high time our clinical learning environments (both preclinical and in every day life) reflect this. They should also be more inclusive and we should be learning with and from our patients far more than we do. Although the above graphic applies to classroom settings, it contains many lessons for us.

 

With leadership and personal agency holding true, a culture then develops in which continuous learning is the norm. Learning environments, fuelled by kenotic power create a space in which an organisation can begin to truly flourish. It creates a net of accountability, teamwork, improvement and measurement, making the entire system more reliable. It is vital that we create this as one of the core principles upon which we build our future health and social care systems.

 

 

 

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