Comment / Over to you

The HFMA board met in Birmingham last month to discuss the association’s programme.  The main item of business was the new strategy ’14-17’, which looks to set the direction for HFMA over the next period. The board were pleased with the work done to develop the vision, but it is their clear intention for you, the members, to have a say about how it should look.

The next three years will be arguably the toughest in the NHS, with no sign of major new funding and a focus on patient-centred healthcare and value. The association believes finance professionals need to be at the heart of the agenda given that, as HFMA president Andy Hardy says, ‘every clinical decision is a financial decision’. Therefore the strategy is designed to assist the role of the finance professional through education, support and thought leadership. 

With new policy director Paul Briddock on board, we also want to develop more influential relationships and have an active media and influencing strategy. Paul has made an excellent start – his recent media forays have included a radio interview on BBC Five Live.

We will be hosting our ‘31 days in May’ consultation this month, so I want to briefly go through the changes. The strategy is split into five different strands. The first – ‘providing excellent member networks’ – is all about membership. We need to develop our core membership base to get a higher proportion of CCAB accountants and finance directors. That’s about extolling the benefits of membership, improving our member offer and developing our successful branch network.

The second is ‘increasing our influence and voice’. Across all four nations we want to be more influential through comments and articles and getting the message right. In this respect, and many others, the appointment of Simon Dolph as marketing director has been a great help in getting our message across. Also, the work we do day in day out with organisations such as Monitor is important in carrying forward our own influence. 

That objective is complemented by our third objective – ‘building on our policy and technical work’.  We have a prodigious output for such a small organisation and I would like to see us really gaining the maximum ‘bang from our buck’ from this in the coming years.

On the education side, we have the objective of ‘expanding our learning and development programmes’. We are looking to dramatically increase the number of continuing professional development hours we produce, developing HFMA TV as a learning concept and creating qualifications for healthcare finance staff. We are being very ambitious here in entering the qualification space, although of course we don’t want to develop a primary accountancy qualification, which is already a crowded arena.

Our final objective is ‘managing ourselves effectively as a business’.  We want to be a well governed and managed organisation, but also, in order to fund the future and to protect the HFMA, we need to keep alive to the many commercial ventures that might be out there.

So please have your say when you get the e-mail! We need to hear your voice, even if it’s just a ‘yes that’s ok’. There will be plenty of opportunities to get involved so please let me know  if you’re interested.