Sharing the health and care innovations made possible during the pandemic
Alongside the frustrations, difficulties and challenges of Covid-19, many great things are happening in the healthcare system. We have captured and classify them so that we don’t end up going back too old, less effective habits. We also bear witness to the many testing and difficult experiences.
You can contribute your experience and views by taking part in the survey here
Alongside the frustrations, difficulties and challenges of the pandemic, many great things are happening in the healthcare system. We undertook a survey to help the NHS remember and build on them, so that we don’t end up going back too old, less effective habits. What we heard about what the NHS wants to keep was astounding.
The survey showed that almost overnight, for some people, the NHS turned into a high performing health system. NHS transformation boards have been working for years to lead the NHS into New Models of Care that mimic those that are already bread and butter in high performing health systems around the world – Intermountain, Nuka, Jonkoping, Buurtzorg – places that have been visited by countless NHS staff, and that have mentored, coached and supervised the NHS over many years. Yet within all the things staff wanted to keep, were all the key conditions of these very effective health systems.
Many will describe the digital innovation and yes thats part of it, but in reading the responses to the survey we found so much more:
What has worked has been relational conditions that underpin all high performing health systems, achieved by extraordinary professionals and communities, unleashed from the tyranny of mistrust and dependency creating control.
Whatever happens next NHS Leaders can proactively capture these vital changes and make them permanent. This is what it will take:
Valued Staff: Being valued as staff and having the energy to focus on the job.
It was shocking to hear clinical staff talking about the value of being able to access food and water 24/7; of having somewhere to go to deal with stress and grief; things just not available in the day to day NHS. Proper care for NHS staff doing difficult work has to stay.
21st Century Tools: Engagement with a new set of digital tools and ways of working
Rapid implementation of so many tools that have been on the periphery for a long time waiting for adoption. In Primary Care particularly Telephone Triage has worked well and video consultation is something respondents wished to keep. This has to stay.
Engaged Leaders: A visible and engaged leadership
NHS staff engaged by leaders that listen, who are visible and who collaborate. This has to stay.
Basics and care foundations finally fixed, reorganised. Sorted.
Data Sharing between NHS and LA; Getting software and hardware to enable staff to consult from home “inconceivable a month ago”; Meetings by zoom when they are needed to do relevant rapid problem solving; massive reduction in paperwork for discharge and referrals. All of these show the ‘back office’ systems now orientating to support effective clinical practice. This has to stay.
A joined-up local health system getting things done
Local collaborative problem solving has worked. Professionals working in different organisations or in siloed departments are suddenly able to work together. The discharge to assess debacle has been sorted overnight. Virtual rounds in care homes, collective redesign of pathways agreed, direct communication across boundaries. Local teams, leaders, charities, and businesses are finding a way through problems that cannot be solved nationally (and the centre should not wrestle control back). We are the most hierarchical centralised democracy in the western world and that has to change. Local decision-making to meet local need must stay.
Great Teams: We are working day-to-day as a real team
Overwhelmingly NHS staff talked about the value of time to connect as a team to peer review decisions, to support each other, to learn and to adapt. The value of being part of a team you know, where you can build relationships and work together is critical for good quality care. This must stay. The production line model of working has to stop.
Being Professional: A huge increase in ‘professional’ working behaviour
Professional practice requires peer review, evidence based decision making, learning, scrutiny and collaboration to meet patient need. This has been lost or conceded as risk management and contracting for tasks dominated. Professionals described the joy of learning together, moving out from specialisms to collaborate, taking peer reviewed decisions with confidence. This must stay.
Decisions based on needs and what’s best with proactive planning for the future
Prevention is back on the agenda. Clinicians are moving out of the reactive mode and thinking proactively about their populations needs and how to meet them from anticipatory care plans to chronic disease management. Thinking together across the system about how to intervene earlier. This must stay.
Patients as Partners: Mutual decision-making and partnership with patients
A significant change has been where clinicians have moved into a new relationship with patients and carers – more mutual, more respectful and more understanding (both ways). Informed shared decision-making. This must stay.
Community connections, collaboration and support
As the NHS demonstrated its human vulnerability and reached out for help, communities were there. This rapid transformation of the NHS’s attitude to communities in the deficit model of ‘needy’ to the asset model of communities with resources has to stay.
And so we come to the evidence on high-performing health systems (Baker & Denis 2011). They all have these relational conditions, as well as access to great data to inform their decisions. We have seen that it’s possible for the NHS to do this too.
We also asked what NHS staff thought should never be repeated. This is what they said:
Already the old world is biting back, the culture of the NHS beurocracy, power which resides in the hierarchy, the resistance to local devolution, is already back using transactional contracting methods. The NHS that has experienced first hand the power of being a real quality system can choose that future by paying attention to these relationships and conditions; or it can react like Pavlov’s dog to the bait of contracting. Choose relationships, Choose networks, Choose systems, Choose collaboration, Choose professional responsibility, Choose to be proactive and make the new NHS.
FOOTNOTE: These are conditions that I set out in 2016 (The Old World Bites Back) – suggesting that by 2020 health and care would be collaborating to meet population health need with systems leadership that invested in data and people, with a clear purpose in partnership with people and communities. The NHS has not managed to do it (as I predicted) by project management. It would be wrong to re-write the story of Covid and credit the current ‘transformation’ to command and control management for the crisis.
Survey Respondents:
Reference
Baker, GR., Denis, JL. (2011) A Comparative Study of Three Transformative Healthcare Systems: Lessons for Canada. Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement.
* With thanks to Myron Rogers for the quote -whose interview on Leading through the Pandemic you can see here
This week I have invited Charlotte Augst to talk with me about the Community Response and the new relationship being forged in some places between health services and local people. We cover the results of the survey that shows how much the NHS has appreciated and been surprised by how Communities have gifted their time and support.
This week I have invited Brent James to talk with me about learning systems. Last week I sent out a survey asking people working in the NHS what they want to keep from this time, what they never want to happen again, and the opportunities for the NHS. The results looked very like the culture and operational model of Intermountain Healthcare. I asked Brent how can we make sure the best of the way the NHS has worked well sticks. He said “Dont ask for permission just do it!”
This week we move on from focusing on the systemic challenge of the pandemic to discuss how as leaders we ourselves are the instrument, and how in our practice we shape the future by how we engage with this context. Taking a more personal approach Liz de Wet brings her global experience in leadership practice in a more intimate conversation on how we lead.
Last week I talked to Irwin Turbitt about recognising the adaptive challenge that this pandemic presents for the health system. This week I am talking with Myron Rogers and we are going to discuss how to lead this emergent adaptive work. What principles and practices will we need to draw on?
In our discussion we touch on this vlog by Dayna Cunningham, Community Involvement Innovators lab at MIT, on her experience of the pandemic
My second interview is with Irwin Turbitt discussing the adaptive challenge of the pandemic and how to harness the relationships generated in the crisis into a new collaborative effort in the future.
The first interview is with Keith Grint, Emeritus Professor at Warwick University on the lessons from his work on leading Critical, Tame and Wicked Problems. We discuss the interplay between command and control and adaptive leadership, the role of soft power, and how to ensure you are the best decision-maker you can be.
Three conversations this week showed how easy it is to get seduced into doing the wrong thing. All of these showed that if primary care focuses its change effort on fad or ill informed policy it will just make things worse. We have to take an evidence based view.
These were the conversations:
You have seen this slide before – where we show that young people aged 7-24 are not accessing GP appointments.
What Helen told me was shocking. She said that across West Yorkshire 30% of the out of hours demand was for young people aged 16 and under.
Earlier in the week I’d been contacted by a network of PCNs who had decided to tackle the issue primary care for young people – which is really great. They were going to go to schools and tell them about social prescribing and the services they were offering. The data above tells us that walking into a GP practice is not what young people want or need. I suggested two things to the PCN Network to think about:
When you read my blogs on people who attend frequently in Primary Care you will see that there are 3 main issues:
My vlog (at the bottom of this blog) on working with general practice and their communities, shows that when you ask communities they say that to live a good and healthy life firstly people need shelter, stable finances, family and friends, meaningful lives and work etc. But the Marmot Review 10 years on shows us how these basic needs are not being met and are undermining people’s health:
General Practice is experiencing an increase in demand directly related to people’s social conditions. No amount of social prescribing and extended hours will solve this problem – it needs to be solved at source. I don’t know how many appointments are for poverty-created health needs, but we need to find out. As I said at the RCGP conference – primary care has to understand need so it can push back against policies that are sticking plasters not problem solvers. Once we know this we can work with local government, our political representatives and the public to help people. I would argue GPs have a professional duty to do so.
Another key issue here is the disproportionate impact for the minority ethnic population , and that leads me to the last conversation
I was at a meeting of the Advisory Group for the RSA’s Future of Health and Care work. One area that is generating a lot of attention is genome sequencing and the ability to predict people’s health almost from birth. However a few weeks ago I’d chaired a cancer conference for Inspire2Live (a brilliant organisation that brings the best of science, clinical knowledge and citizen leadership together) rather cleverly called “Evidence, Arrogance, Ignorance, Eminence’ – which rather sums up the NHS dilemma. These presentations got to the heart of the issues:
No amount of genome sequencing is going to help if (a) our data for determining solutions does note reflect the ethnic mix of our population and (b) we don’t address the critical issues of living healthy lives …. we are back to Marmot. The future of health and care is in living well not treating disease accelerated by poor social norms (poverty, investment in education…).
After the push back on the draft DES what should PCNs be doing themselves to secure better quality primary care, reduce demand and improve population health?
I’ve written plenty of blogs on PC so this one is an update on key issues where you can make a difference without centrally prescribed solutions.
Purpose
Whilst there are endless contributions about PCNs having to find their own purpose and NHSE not prescribing a sole purpose, the draft DES demonstrated the disconnect between what PCN CDs thought PCNs were for and how to deliver that, and NHSE’s approach.
To find out what PCNs think they are for I set up a survey which you can fill in here sharing your Purpose with colleague PCNs (and where you can see theirs) which will give you access to the emerging picture of how PCNs describe their raison d’etre and what they are focusing on.
The survey shows the following direction in terms of purpose:
“To develop integrated working and sharing across practices to provide resilience and allow for innovation and excellent community based care for patients.”
“Strengthened practices, empowered community, support of the vulnerable”
“Joined up working to address issues one at a time across the PCN to improve care”
The responses so far focus on working collaboratively to:
On the whole these mirror my proposal in terms of domains of work with reference to other health systems internationally:
Any purpose must be described in a way that you would know if you’d achieved it – these PCN ones signal direction but they are not quite there yet in terms of specificity along the lines of some famous ones (e.g. RNLI – a charity that saves lives at sea).
Without purpose PCNs will, like the rest of the system, be reactive rather than proactive. And it’s being reactive that has generated the crisis in PC.
So NHSE should be heartened from those that have participated so far, that the direction of travel they describe will secure quality primary care. But the next year is crucial – the same PCNs have been wise in where they are focusing their efforts, getting member practices on board, collaborating on complex needs, securing a workforce to meet needs. Disrupting the formation of these collaborative networks will mean these PCNs will not achieve their purpose (that and unsophisticated metrics for monitoring see below on averages). And this was the push back on the Draft DES – PCNs need space to understand the problems they face and build the relationships to collaborate.
Step one is to get a clear purpose and determine your focus for the coming year. Then direct your development money at achieving that. Assuming yours will be along the lines of those above here are some updates:
Meeting Complex Needs – Acuity
I’ve talked before about ‘know your list’ – if you know the patterns of people using your services (and other services e.g.A&E) you can start to be proactive in meeting needs. This means you have to differentiate your list. In the blogs on Frequent Attenders here and here we identified that people who turn up frequently are not all the same sort of people. We share how you might differentiate the ‘type’ of FA. Our proposition is that in all practices there are varying degrees of ‘acuity’. Here is an example of the range of complexity for the whole system and how to differentiate within a practice
One Surgery devised a project to improve how they triage, care for, and provide continuity to patients who attend their surgery the most (>30 attendances in last year), using an Emis code within our Care Plan template to trigger a “Patient Access Contract”. Over a 12 week period for 25 people with the Access Contract, the data shows a reduction in all appointments of 43% (67 less appointments for 25 patients), a reduction in the number of clinicians involved by 45%, and a reduction in OOH contacts by 56%, suggesting that improved continuity can reduce demand on appointments and improve care. This is the first iteration of their innovation in reducing the number of people who attend frequently. They are going on to explore even better ways of identifying and proactively securing continuity.
The only health warning on this is the regression to the mean – we know that a % of people who attend frequently do just stop attending frequently in the subsequent year, so this is a great start and its good to look even deeper for the patterns over time.
Care Homes
There was a fair degree of uproar at the care home requirement in the draft spec. However the direction of travel was supported. You can find an overview of ‘what works in care homes’ here and I’ve popped a googledrive with evidence summaries here (if you have more do send and I’ll add). It triggered the sharing of multiple examples of dedicated teams of nurses, ward rounds, paramedic hot lines, GP alignment, and concerns that the DES would disband the best practice that has emerged.
People who live in Care Homes have increasingly complex needs and need continuity. Staff working in Care Homes are in the lowest 10% of the pay scale, are often on zero hours contracts, and there is a high turnover of staff (Roy Lilley, Gimme Strength 15th January 2020). It’s tough working in care homes, and even tougher if you are trying to navigate the different requirements and care plans of practices where the residents are registered. We know aligning care homes to practices improves the quality of care for people who live there – and they spend less time in hospital. As above in the section on acuity – having continuity makes a real difference as does valuing and supporting people who care for these folk. So given this is known, why isn’t primary care doing this everywhere? My experience is that many Practices have found ways of working with their CCG and Local Council to solve the problem. But there are examples where this is not happening – often a mix of a lack of imagination about funding and Practices being intransigent. It doesn’t require a DES, it requires learning from those who have worked it out, and for a collaborative approach to funding. Proactive management improves people’s lives, reduces overall costs and reduces demands on general practice overall, but it does need the CCGs to find ways to fund it. My sense is that PCNs can solve this one without a DES – and should.
Here are a couple of amazing examples:
“For several years we have a LES for GP care home rounds and one care home per Practice. It works, our practice does weekly rounds and we have the lowest rate of unplanned admissions for dementia patients in the county.”
“We have GP weekly ward round. GPs are supported by community nurse practitioners from community services. We were one of the care home vanguards. Secondary care geriatricians support weekly MDT. We have case management and pharmacist support. We have developed fantastic relationships with care home staff we support & help each other. It reduces overall demand for GPs.”
Social Prescribing
To help people struggling with life you need to recognise their assets, and make the most of the assets in your community to generate a network of local people (volunteers) who can help each other, lead by practice/patient/community champions who will nurture and value and grow the volunteers. See this blog.
Social prescribers can help that happen if they have skills in community building, and they should have. Without that SPs will be inundated with the need for appointments with people who need ‘connecting’ – and they will never meet the need. As we are seeing, SPs are finding that their appointments are filled quickly. Sucking up what should be the role of community building into the NHS won’t work. You can see more in my blog on this here.
SP came out of fantastic examples of success. These had at their essence, community building; face to face appointments for people who need help navigating the system; support to be able to make personal choices; help with their coping strategies; and leadership of this combined system. Those transactional models that are emerging will increase demand and will not reduce workload. Just a reminder from my SP blog
Metrics that relate to the transactional model (number of appointments) mirrors the problems in general practice. We provided a set of metrics for SP based on models that have worked and have demonstrable impact in terms of people living well and reducing their demand on the NHS. This is what we found in The Asset Based Health Inquiry. How best to develop social prescribing? (page 17)
“We suggest metrics along these lines that get to the heart of the intent of a primary care model of social prescribing:
Reducing Unwarranted Variation – Understanding Primary Care
Underneath all of this is a fundamental difficulty in understanding Primary Care. This blog isn’t long enough to go into the details – I’ll ask Nick Downham to help us out here – but one thing is for sure, getting all practices to the ‘average’ of them all is not securing quality nor will it solve the problems in PC.
I had a rather odd experience recently where a practice was below average on out patient referrals one year and above (a bit) in the next year and the CCG wanted to know what the problem was. The average had gone up because all the PCN practices had improved!!! It wasn’t a problem, the average had changed. Somehow getting to average will solve A&E admits, referrals etc. etc? Of course it doesn’t. There needs to be a fundamental change in understanding at CCG level about what they are commissioning for (it seems to be reduced A&E admits rather than people living healthy lives, and there is a belief that will reduce secondary care costs), how the metrics they use relate to what they are commissioning for (A&E admits are not just about PC nor are all A&E Admits bad, AND you need to understand what sort of A&E admits you need to reduce and by how much – i.e. what’s good practice and what’s possible). Another GP practice challenged this narrative to find that the A&E admits their CCG wanted to reduce wasn’t anything to do with their practice.
So another blog to follow on how you reduce unwarranted variation in primary care but the starting place has to be:
At the heart of all of this is data. PCNs are getting a range of support to meet needs, but they need help understanding population need, understanding variation and acuity, differentiating their list, understanding if what they are doing is making a difference. As yet there is no additional provision for data support to understand all these key factors. If there is one thing that will help PCNs get off the ground its data.
Thanks to Ben Gowland for being a great interviewer. Here is my view on PCNs, purpose, direction, where to start and what to say ‘no’ too.
You can visit Ben’s site here
