The Changing NHS

Imagine you are a newly appointed CEO of a Primary Care Trust. It’s your first CEO post and you are keen to earn a deserved reputation as being innovative, credible and far sighted.

One of the most important issues on your new To-Do list is how best to engage with the Government’s flagship White Paper ‘Our Health Our Care Our Say’. The Government clearly wishes to encourage “more effective health and social care provision outside of hospitals”. More specifically, it wishes to encourage “more personalised care, services closer to people’s homes, better co-ordination with local Councils, increased patient choice and a focus on prevention as much as cure”.

You know that the Government will initiate a lot of activity itself (too much maybe) and your organisation will need to play it’s part in helping these central initiatives take hold ‘on the ground’ – but beyond this – you're really  keen to make your own mark by initiating local change projects that succeed in bringing about concrete and welcomed changes that are in keeping with the spirit of the White Paper.

You call together a few friends and brainstorm some ideas for getting started. Ideas include:

1. Ask an acute Trust CEO to lead a planning group to identify 3 great initiatives your organisation should support?
2. Bring 25 GPs and 25 acute specialists (paediatricians, geriatricians and general physicians) together for a day and ask them to come up with at least 10 ideas before they leave the room?
3. Hold back 2% of your organisation’s contracting income and only make it available to support new or redesigned services that are proposed by joint groups of clinicians and social care professionals where at least 50% of the membership comes from social care.
4. Host a quarterly 'Innovations Breakfast' – where you advertise for / invite private and not-for- profit companies with good ideas to come along and pitch ideas informally to you and senior managers and local GPs 
5. Find 10 ‘super-patients’, give them lots of support and ask them to redesign a key service (Super-patients = articulate, knowledgeable, motivated and time rich)
6. Invite the Local Authority to nominate someone to review all Commissioning decisions and insist that they block at least 3 proposals.

So, what's next? Tell me, how did you get to win that Award?

Steve

www.stevepashley.co.uk

nhsinnovationprimary care