The Changing NHS

I facilitated a workshop last week for a PCT that was seeking to develop new insights into its' emerging strategy. One of the 5 strategic intents in the draft strategy was 'to reduce health inequalities within the local population'. No surprises there. After all, most PCTs espouse this ambition although admittedly a few do go further and articulate some goals about the extent, nature and speed of the reductions they seek to help achieve.

Things got more interesting however when the Director of Public Health reminded people that only about 20% of the local population had what most people would consider to be relatively poor health status.  Mmmmn, so what part of the PCTs new strategy spoke directly to the 80% of local people who were quite healthy?....a bit of a silence followed..... Well, perhaps the 80% would be very happy just to know that the PCT was really focused on helping the 20% 'close the gap' was one suggestion.....Mmmmn not so sure about that.

Eventually the idea of creating a PCT strategy that related, in different ways, to different segments of the local population began to take hold. We all knew this wasn't rocket science but we all also knew that, for some reason, it was not an approach to strategy making that has happened to-date.

Now we could get into some interesting questions: How best to segment? What to focus on for each segment? How to operate internally with this more layered mindset? Let the strategy making begin......

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