HFMA 2018: long-term plan needs hope and credibility

06 December 2018

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Asked what they wanted to see in the new plan – due to be published in December – Claire Murdoch (seated left), chief executive of Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust and national mental health director for NHS England, said there needs to be a ‘belief that things can change’. ‘It is hard to know when you are working really hard and you are right up against it, but we can change this health system,’ she said. And she said that it needed to find a way to engage the public in its own health and wellbeing. panel l

Anita Charlesworth (second from right), director of research and economics at The Health Foundation said the plan needed to have hope and credibility. ‘We’ve been relying on an immense bank of goodwill [from staff] and we are overdrawn,’ she said. ‘We need to give staff a sense of hope that they can address the issues they see as barriers to doing what they came into the health service to do.’

She said that there needed to be a change from the current ‘crisis narrative’ but warned against simply delivering a ‘wish list disconnected from reality’. ‘It needs to be credible on how to make it happen,’ she said.

Rebecca Rosen (right), GP and senior fellow at the Nuffield Trust, also focused on workforce as a key issue. ‘In primary care, it is not just about numbers but how we create a workforce that can take on new roles, new ways of working and new relationships at pace while working under pressure,’ she said. ‘We need to see ways to address this challenge that are feasible and technology enabled.’ But she also said there needed to be recognition of the time needed to make these changes.

Caroline Clarke (second from left), deputy chief executive of the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust said that the Five-year forward view had targeted  letting a thousand flowers bloom. ‘But now we need to be quite pragmatic,’ she said. ‘If we are serious about tackling variation for reasons of quality and cost then some level of standardisation is really important. The plan needs to talk about how we work in partnership and how we use technology at scale to reduce variation, about how we standardise operating models across horizontal and vertical systems and actually allows us to be a little bit more directive.’