‘Last chance saloon’: releasing ambition to transform the NHS

At NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester last week, both the Secretary of State and the NHS England Chief Executive wanted to focus on how much money is spent on the NHS – £205billion (the equivalent of the GDP of Portugal as Sir Jim pointed out). Both speakers stressed that right now a lot of this money is spent in the wrong places.

The reasons why money is spent in the wrong place are in part structural (driven by an outdated operating model), partly cultural (a tendency to keep doing more of the same), and – according to Sir Jim – partly because ‘ambition’ for change ‘needs to be released’.

This last point is interesting; in services which feel overwhelmed by demand and under resourced it can feel ‘ambitious’ just to get through each day. But ambition has to go further than this because as a couple of Confed speakers said the NHS is ‘in the last chance saloon’.

A very current issue where ambition is needed is neighbourhood health. Delivered to its full potential, neighbourhood health could transform health and care. However, it seems like a lot of systems are struggling to know where to start, so the ambition for neighbourhood health feels compressed. There seems to be a hope that the 10 Year Plan will give some clarity on the ‘how’ of neighbourhood health.

At IMPOWER we believe that part of our mission is to enable ambition amongst the systems which we work with. Practically this means helping our clients to figure out how to take the first step on a change journey, helping them to identify where to invest limited resources. We do this by facilitating test and learn cycles, growing confidence in change, and releasing ambition through the experience of trying innovative solutions.

This takes us back to the challenge that money is spent in the wrong places. If we are going to rectify this system-wide challenge then we might need to start small, reallocating relatively small sums of money, doing so with a commitment to learn and grow. Through this approach we grow real ambition, founded on hard evidence of what successful transformation looks like.

This approach of testing, learning and growing can help to make our health system more resilient and more capable of turning ambition into reality. This approach applies whether we are thinking about technologies, medicines, or services, the key is having the confidence to take the first step. If you would like a conversation about how IMPOWER can support your health transformation journey, please get in touch.