Comment / Improving communication

As a very wet summer comes to its end, I hope you could catch some sun somewhere. Rest and relaxation particularly in the frenetic world of healthcare finance is important. The HFMA starts the important run-up to the December annual conference with a host of events through Finance Skills Development, branches, faculties and the Healthcare Costing for Value Institute.

Our president has committed to attend every branch conference this year in the spirit of Everyone counts, and is well on track to achieve his aim. As ever, our branch conferences offer professional development opportunities in a more localised setting – always very good value.  Several of our autumn events are sold out, but it might be worth checking what your branch is putting on. The autumn period will be busy, I’m sure, but it’s important that we continue to meet together to learn from each other.  

At the annual conference in December, our final motivational session for the Friday will be led by Olympic triathletes the Brownlee brothers – something to put a spring in your step!  

Our intention is to change the format on
Thursday to include shorter sessions inspired by the famous TED talks. We will still have the main plenary sessions, and key figures in NHS finance will deliver ‘state of the nation’ speeches, but I’m keen to embrace new learning styles. The conference needs to change as we move forward.

Another notable change this year will be to our Wednesday night ‘presidents dinner’. We are keen over the next few years to turn this into a celebration of all our students’ achievements. Details will be announced nearer to conference, but I hope delegates can join us.

We’ve been doing a lot of work on our culture at the HFMA over the past few months. Founded in Bristol in late 2000, we remained relatively small – about 20 people – for over a decade. Today, we are an 80-strong team (about 50 whole timers). And when you run an organisation as complicated as the HFMA, which has over a dozen staff based ‘in the field’, the challenges are significant.  

The key issue for us is to ensure you get the very best service from the association. We’re very keen on feedback and we collect a lot of it. The ‘scores on the doors’ are usually impressive and I’m always proud of our efforts.  

However, the area we are working on is how best we communicate with organisations. We have so many products and services that it can be quite complicated. So we’re hoping shortly to have more of a single point of contact for each organisation.  

This will give you smoother access to our services – and it will mean we don’t bother you unnecessarily. We hope organisations will notice a change. You are, I’m sure, already aware of our website and our extensive presence on social media. And we are still open to more traditional means of communication – pick up the phone and give us a call. 

December sees the launch of a new HFMA app and the test versions I’ve seen are extremely impressive. I anticipate this being a popular and useful addition to our offering.

The HFMA is always changing and moving forward – if you have any ideas as to how we can improve our services, please drop me an email at [email protected]