Comment / Keep our heads up

Many of us will have recently come back from our summer holidays. However, if we look at some of the headlines surrounding the NHS at the moment, it feels like we are in the throes of a bleak midwinter.

‘Winter’ pressures in terms of emergency attendances are clearly a thing of the past, as many hospitals, including my own, have seen activity levels over the summer exceed those of the previous winter. At the same time we have a number of media sources starting to report on an impending financial crisis within the NHS.

The temptation, and I would even say the danger, at times such as these is to simply get our heads down and plough on with the day-to-day tasks that face us. 

However, it is exactly at times like this that I strongly believe we all need to rise to the leadership challenge. That means keeping our heads up and, as much as possible, we must look to
the future and navigate a course through undeniably choppy waters.

It was an honour to represent the HFMA UK at this summer’s annual ANI conference of the HFMA USA. I’m not the first HFMA president to comment on the similarities of the challenges facing our two health systems. But it really is remarkable how, despite completely different structures and financing arrangements, we are all grappling with the same challenges.

An ageing population, changing disease patterns and a difficult economic context are not conditions unique to the NHS. I’ve challenged us all in finance to ‘lead by numbers’ and we can only do this if we all manage to carve time out of our busy schedules to consider the medium- to long-term leadership challenge. Simply continuing with our heads down, trying to get to 31 March 2015 in as stable a position as possible simply isn’t enough.

As another of my presidential duties, I will be chairing the second annual HFMA thought leadership retreat at the end of this month. For those that attend the event, this will provide the perfect environment to really get stuck into the key questions about how we tackle the future.

I recognise that we cannot afford the luxury of everyone taking time out of the office for such things. However, we can, and must, all stand back with our teams to ask ourselves the difficult questions about what the future holds and how we can lead the response to these challenges.

For me ‘leading by numbers’ means supporting clinicians and service lines to understand the service and financial impacts of new ways of working. It means actually helping to implement new pathways.

And it also means getting involved with currency and pricing development and ensuring our own services pass the value test.

Of course the here and now is as important as it has ever been. But let’s make sure that we get our heads up and that we are also looking to, and planning for, the long term.

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