Whether it’s talking to colleagues within our organisation, commissioners, GPs, system leaders or even just consuming the mainstream media, it is clear that the UK’s health and social care systems are interlinked and challenged to a degree they have not experienced before. The only way we can create a long term fix is if we put aside our traditional partisan positions and our binary, ‘winners and losers’ ways of thinking.
Our Connect Health board have agreed a framework of three simple objectives to make a contribution to solving some of these problems in geographies where we have a presence;
- Continuous improvement – there’s lots we can do internally to improve our clinical effectiveness and operational efficiency, however, we have to invest time and money to achieve what we want.
- Visibility of performance – from clinical outcomes and patient experience to waiting times and workforce capacity, we have data on over 150k musculoskeletal patients per year. We hope that both the quantity and quality of data that we hold exceeds anything that has been shared previously. We are working to simplify and share that data to better inform the way we work, design services and demonstrate value. If we do not learn from the data, we are missing a valuable opportunity.
- Influence – at national, and perhaps more importantly, local level, get out and share the data with commissioners and other leaders to educate and inform decisions across in profession to improve patient care.
If we stay focused on the patient, collaborate and be prepared to work in a different way, the money will go much further.