The Changing NHS

I ran another 24 hour workshop last week as part of the work I’m involved in to help a bunch of NHS managers and doctors sketch out a set of ‘edge of plausibility’ scenarios for health and wellbeing systems in 2020.

I’ve talked before about this work and especially about the difficulty people often have in contemplating futures that differ from the logic of current strategic intent. That’s still the case, although the process is now better and people consequently get more help to ‘let go’ of the present’.

The starting point for constructing the scenario set is consideration of 28 ‘high impact / high uncertainty questions’ and I thought, in no particular order, you might like to see what they are:

1. What might the first 10 years of our lives be like?

2. What might the last 10 years of our lives be like?

3. What impact might new medical technologies have?

4. What impact might genetics and new pharmacological developments have?

5. What might happen if individuals became real consumers of healthcare and wellbeing services?

6. How might healthcare and wellbeing systems be paid for?

7. What might a prediction, prevention and promotion system look like?

8. How might competition and collaboration co-exist?

9. What form might leadership of healthcare and wellbeing systems take?

10. How might lower levels of social cohesion impact on healthcare and wellbeing systems?

11. How might information technology impact on healthcare and wellbeing systems?

12. What might be the ‘psychological contract’ between employers and their workforce?

13. Where might entrepreneurialism lead?

14. How might a more informed and knowledgeable society change healthcare and wellbeing systems?

15. What might happen if the search for better outcomes really drove behaviour?

16. What might happen to the balance between care and cure?

17. What might a truly efficient health and wellbeing system look like?

18. What might be different if all local stakeholders were facing ‘in the same direction’?

19. What might the future landscape for healthcare services look like?

20. How might climate change impact on healthcare and wellbeing systems?

21. What impact might the increasing globalisation of economics have?

22. What might be different if the priority was to reduce health inequalities?

23. What might be different if the priority were to maximise everyone’s health potential?

24. How might accelerating population migration impact on healthcare and wellbeing systems?

25. What key new roles might emerge?

26. What might be the impact of new diseases?

27. How might politics exert more of an influence on the nature of healthcare and wellbeing systems?

28. How might strategic commissioning evolve?

What you make of these questions? Do these seem like the best big questions to you? Am I missing some?

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scenarios

healthcare