Political manifestos that promise to spend more money are failing to grapple with the powerful underlying forces at work in healthcare. Indeed, they may be ignoring these in order to score (cheap?) political points with voters.
There is clear evidence of failure to use good practice, of time-wasting clinical workflow and excessive political and bureaucratic overhang. Granted the UK state (in its components) is justified seeking a form of accountability for the vast expenditure of public money, but this does not necessarily entail control of how the money is spent and this particular debate is questionable given the performance of other countries’ health systems (e.g. the Dalton review). Historical evidence would show that public control of expenditure in many areas leads to “rent-seeking” behaviours by public servants at the expense of service quality.
Governance arrangements such as proposed at Greater Manchester look little different from the NHS as a whole and I fear will lead to excessive wasteful bureaucracy at the expense of front-line service quality (seen from the patient’s perspective not the bureaucrats). I wonder if they will achieve the same degree of performance as the Swedish county councils.
The power shift that is underway in healthcare, with its consumerisation through digital technology, publicly accessible performance information, and priority on value-for-money (which are not bad things) wrong-foots policy positions that seek to exert the role of the state at the expense of individual patient control and choice. And going forward, it is hard to justify disenfranchising patients from control of their healthcare when so much of their lives is under their control.
Whole Person Care as a Labour political slogan may play well in the press, but creating it requires thinking about how whole systems of care integrate and this will challenge the dysfunctional fault line running through some parties’ politics on the role of the private/independent/voluntary sectors.
This thinking is absent (at this stage) from the Greater Manchester MOU, meaning the capacity of the private and independent sectors is not included in their total health system capacity planning. But failing to grasp the needs of other than NHS organisations is not limited to this, but extends to workforce planning, which must also satisfy the needs of the private sector across a wide range of workplace settings. One may not like private healthcare, but it is irresponsible to ignore its existence.
We know that quality may be poor and performance reporting and information virtually impossible to obtain from private providers but there are reasons for this. From the position of a patient, NHS commissioners should be agnostic on the fitness of a provider and this would have the benefit of integrating care and quality across the patient treatment pathway and incorporate all possible sources of capacity and service delivery. It is the failure to normalise the role of the private and independent/volunteer sectors within total health system capacity that causes considerable fragmentation to patient care, and contributes to political posturing on the back of patient care. It would be wrong to assume failure is unique to the private sector and no political party can ignore the failures of the NHS (Bristol, Mid Staffs, and so many others).
In part this has been caused by the Department of Health traditionally insulating NHS providers from quality reporting and the consequences of failure. All governments have a problem to imagine the failure of publicly funded organisations (in any sector), but they do happen and require serious action to fix. Regretfully, there is evidence that local authorities exhibit the same behaviours.
What Cognology says
In the end, the disinfecting light of public scrutiny is the solution, not more money. The NHS still avoids formal provider accreditation, instead opting for a (complex and troubled) inspection system through CQC which only now appears to be understanding the importance of provider failure — but failure in a complex care system is about people failing to act, of systems that are dysfunctional, and yes, driven by a focus on wrong-headed targets and a focus on pleasing political masters.