The Changing NHS

Broadly speaking, patients/users can exert influence on the NHS in 3 ways:

1) By providing feedback; 2) By co-producing value (in partnership with clinical and managerial professionals); and 3) By designing new services and redesigning existing ones.

Some news on the feedback route. The annual analysis of NHS complaints has just been published. An interesting read (that’s sad I hear you say!). Key points include: a) just over 95,000 official complaints, 5% up on last year; b) 36,000 complaints about aspects of clinical care; and c) 11,500 complaints about staff attitude.

Susan Abbott’s ideas about a Responsiveness Spectrum seem well worth thinking about here. Let’s hope we’re learning from all this?

On Co-production. I was sorting out some old files and found this interesting diagram yesterday, I think it came from a talk by Julian LeGrand when he was a Health Adviser at No 10. A simple yet very powerful graphic.

      I wonder if any NHS organisation is trying to identify the optimal relationship between a professional and a patient/user for a given number of common situations. Obviously a tall order, maybe even impossible. But perhaps the diagram could be a really useful tool for some local development sessions, where groups of clinicians and patients meet with each other to try and agree on the optimal relationship they desire in a number of given situations. A variant of ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ party game comes to mind.

Finally, the Blog world is wash with material on User Led Design. Professor Eric von Hippel, Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at MIT seems to be a key player here. Patty Seybold’s Outside Innovation blog has a nice post on some key lessons from a Hippel seminar on User Led Design that is well worth a quick look.

All in all, it seems to me that the Trusts that will have most success in this new style NHS we are busy creating will be the ones who are good at:

i) acting fast on feedback;

2) continuously adjusting relationships between patients and professionals; and

3) successfully emulating the design efforts of the most knowledgeable patients/users

Steve

www.stevepashley.co.uk