How can we save the NHS?
I was recently part of a panel at Nesta’s Policy Live event discussing the topic, ‘How can we save the NHS?’. It was perfectly timed, coinciding with the publication of Lord Darzi’s report on the state of the NHS, the same day the Government announced there would be a 10-year plan to reform the NHS.
Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, promised that this 10-year plan will have “the fingerprints of NHS staff and patients all over it”, rather than taking a top-down approach. This statement, alongside the inclusion of an entire chapter dedicated to the patient voice and staff engagement in the report, gives me hope that engagement will rightly play a prominent role in shaping the future of the NHS.
It’s crucial that engagement is done in the right way. Nesta recently published Health and social care: the ideas, outlining eight ideas policymakers should urgently consider. As part of their idea, “Make NHS staff wellbeing a strategic priority: improving data collection and transparency, testing wellbeing interventions, and scaling the ones that work”, they state, “there is currently neither a sufficiently timely nor actionable picture of workforce wellbeing, or a strong mandate to invest in wellbeing measures.”
They point out that the NHS Staff Survey takes six months to publish and the NHS’s People Pulse survey can be patchy and is not easily accessible. If we are to truly base the upcoming NHS reform on the voice of patients and staff, we also need to reform the way we collect and analyse their feedback.
Using a platform like ImproveWell, which collects real-time feedback from frontline staff, will make the search for priority issues, as well as the associated solutions, more efficient and effective. Allowing for feedback in real-time paints a more accurate picture – not only highlighting issues that are relevant now, but also allowing issues and ideas to be reported that might otherwise be forgotten about when the annual survey comes around.
A platform like ours is also key in filtering and organising ideas into themes, and understanding which ideas are most likely to lead to improvement. This is crucial when soliciting feedback from staff at one of the world’s biggest employers.
When I was asked at Nesta’s event what’s next for the NHS, I explained that retention must be a priority. There is no point in recruiting more staff if we’re losing the experienced ones even faster – it’s well-documented losing this experience and the efficiency that comes with it leads to poorer patient outcomes.
When you ask people who work in these institutions to tell us what we can do to make things better, they say they want to reduce burnout, have more flexibility and more personal development. There are actions that can be taken quickly to help solve these problems, and these should be prioritised ahead of recruitment.
These ‘quick wins’ were proven to work during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was when I saw the most change in the NHS, at pace. Technologies that help self-rostering empower staff, help them prevent burnout and provide flexibility, and they aren’t costly.
The NHS Reserve during the pandemic showed how we can have a more flexible workforce, enabling people who had left the NHS to come back at times of pressure. This could work well post-pandemic to help ease winter pressures and support areas where the backlog is still significant.
A single workforce credential for the NHS, like the Digital Staff Passport, would also afford staff flexibility to work in other hospitals where there was a need – providing greater flexibility and personal development, and saving on expensive agency staff to fill gaps.
Ideas like these come forward when we listen to staff in an effective way, which I hope will be a cornerstone of the development of the Government’s 10-year plan to reform the NHS.
By Dr Na’eem Ahmed, Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of ImproveWell
