{"id":41948,"date":"2018-04-26T16:18:02","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T15:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=41948"},"modified":"2018-05-01T11:57:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-01T10:57:48","slug":"richard-smith-how-to-improve-nhs-improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/04\/26\/richard-smith-how-to-improve-nhs-improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Smith: How to improve NHS Improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Baroness Dido Harding (pictured), the chair of NHS Improvement, is the latest in a series of high achieving business people brought in to improve the NHS, and last week she described to the <a href=\"http:\/\/cambridgehealthnetwork.com\/\">Cambridge Health Network<\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0the formidable challenges she faces.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-41953 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2018\/04\/dido_harding.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"364\" height=\"226\" \/>Harding spent 20 years in retail, working for Tescos and Sainsburys, before running TalkTalk Telecom Group for seven years until 2017. She now sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer, and she\u2019s a non-executive of the Bank of England. She was also for 20 years a jockey and steeplechaser and spoke several times of \u201cmy friend Tony McCoy,\u201d one of the greatest jockeys ever.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Relaxed and confident, speaking with only the briefest notes, Harding started by saying that she had six months\u2019 experience of the NHS while there must be well over a thousand years in the audience. (In fact, at a rough calculation there was probably more than 4000 years.) Her learning curve, she said, was vertical.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harding keeps three things in her mind all the time, the first being that the NHS is the greatest health system in the world. Some, including me, rebelled at this, but her broader point was that you can\u2019t improve a system by talking it down. Despite her first belief she also believes that it could be so much better: a 10 minute experience with the NHS tells you that, she said. She saw no incompatibility between the two beliefs, insisting that the best organisations and people never gave up trying to improve. She described how McCoy, by far away the best jockey of his generation, went home after every race and watched the race on television, searching for a chance to improve. Thirdly, she believes it will be necessary to spend more on the NHS, but the need for increased expenditure is the result of success, keeping people alive for longer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Improvement, she believes, depends on collaboration at \u201cevery level.\u201d It also depends, crucially, on people and leadership. And collaboration must begin at the top\u2014between NHS Improvement and NHS England\u2014\u201cI and E,\u201d as she and others call them. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">NHS Improvement, which has 1300 employees, was formed two years ago by bringing together Monitor, the NHS Trust Development Authority, Patient Safety, and a few other bits and pieces that Harding did not mention. Monitor started as the regulator of foundation trusts but later had added setting NHS prices, enabling integration, and preventing anticompetitive behaviour. NHS Trust Development Authority was formed to encourage trusts that were not foundation trusts to become foundation trusts and to regulate other NHS trusts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In business, said Harding, there are really no mergers, only takeovers. But with NHS Improvement there has been neither a merger nor a takeover: two years after it was formed the separate parts do not work together\u2014and the organisation isn\u2019t clear what it is for. This confusion is compounded by it not being entirely clear what belongs to NHS England and what to NHS Improvement. On a bad day organisations in the NHS may receive conflicting instructions from NHS England and NHS Improvement, and on a really bad day conflicting instructions from different parts of NHS Improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harding and Ian Dalton, the chief executive of NHS Improvement, are \u201cstarting from scratch\u201d in defining the role of NHS Improvement. It is impossible for NHS Improvement and NHS England to merge, and so they operate in business terms like a joint venture. The \u201ccompetition bits\u201d have to be kept separate, but they look to work together wherever possible. In particular, they are creating a joint regional structure with the philosophy of the regions doing as much as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But what can you actually do, Harding has asked herself, to improve a service of 1.3 million people with 1300 people?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Her first answer is through people and leadership. People are 75% of the costs of the NHS, and yet, she has observed, the NHS lacks systematic people management. NHS Improvement appoints the chairs of boards and she wants there to be more rigour in the process. The people in the audience with 4000 years of experience couldn\u2019t help reflecting that \u201cleadership\u201d has been the answer to improving the NHS for a long time with various attempts to improve it. Remember, for example, the NHS University, and there is now the NHS Leadership Academy. Nevertheless, few in the audience dissented from the view that leadership is essential for improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harding\u2019s second lever is process improvement based on data analysis. This too has a long history in the NHS, but the problem is, Harding acknowledged, to get it to scale.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harding was very clear that you can\u2019t get something like the NHS to improve without the professionals, particularly doctors, wanting it to happen and supporting change. Although she has not worked in healthcare, she did in her work in telecoms work with many engineers\u2014and she thinks that there are parallels with doctors in them being highly trained professionals.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another route to improvement is through technology, which she described as being socially and morally neutral: it can be used for good or ill. She was blunt that currently NHS Improvement is \u201cnot present on the pitch\u201d when it comes to technology.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The NHS, Harding observed, is a very obedient sector, and incentives can be powerful levers for improvement. These have to be set jointly with NHS England, and she said that \u201cno incentive is perfect.\u201d She worries that the \u201ccapital to revenue switch,\u201d destroying the seedcorn, is one of the NHS\u2019s biggest problems. She is confident that more money will be forthcoming for the NHS, and her biggest worry is not that it won\u2019t come but that it will be squandered when it does.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Her sixth lever for improvement was \u201cperformance management,\u201d which she notices is a dirty phrase within the NHS. She thinks it important and a positive rather than a negative activity and is trying to find a phrase that the NHS will find acceptable\u2014perhaps \u201cperformance coaching.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The last tool is reconfiguration, but she was very clear that this had to be driven locally with much talking and preferably clinical leadership. The future is \u201cnot drawing a map in Whitehall.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Somebody in the audience urged her not to try to do too much but rather to try and ensure that she succeeded at a few things. She accepted that one of her weaknesses was trying to do too much at once and was grateful for the advice. The mood of the audience was very much to support her and wish her well, hoping that she would be a business person who could bring real benefits to the NHS.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/richard_smith_2014.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-33037\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/richard_smith_2014-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"richard_smith_2014\" width=\"128\" height=\"128\" \/><\/a><em style=\"font-size: 1rem\"><strong>Richard Smith<\/strong>\u00a0was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Competing interest:<\/strong> RS is an NHS patient and has no private insurance and has never had. He was a member of the Labour Party\u2019s Independent Commission on Whole Person Care. Until 2015 he was employed by the UnitedHealth Group, which has customers in the NHS, although he had nothing to do with the business side of the company from 2007. He still has shares in the company. He is also the chair of the board of Patients Know Best, which has customers in the NHS. He is unpaid but has some equity. He also acts as a consultant to Medial EarlySign, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that hopes to develop customers in the NHS.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Baroness Dido Harding (pictured), the chair of NHS Improvement, is the latest in a series of high achieving business people brought in to improve the NHS, and last week she [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2018\/04\/26\/richard-smith-how-to-improve-nhs-improvement\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[236,955],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nhs","category-richard-smith"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Richard Smith: How to improve NHS Improvement - 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