Organisational change

Future NHS funding: kneejerk populism ≠ enduring strategy

This is an expanded version of a comment written in reply to an article in the Guardian of 19 June 2018 (http://tinyurl.com/yd5wcnp5).

Polly Toynbee is precisely right; not enough extra money, with dubious provenance, applied in a populist manner without any careful planning, will result in little change.

In system terms, the whole supply chain needs to be reviewed, and the incentives carefully applied to ensure any impact at all. There are four main stages in this supply chain, and they all need to be considered:

1. Demand is rising because of our increasing healthcare needs as we age and have to manage increasing numbers of co-morbidities (think of someone with diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic leukaemia who is (perhaps not surprisingly) also depressed, for instance), but there are also rising ‘wants’ as our expectations keep rising, often because of irresponsible political promises of ‘more and better’ services. These haven’t ever been addressed, with the result that health services are seen as a ‘free good’ used as we might use our cold water tap. As one might expect from politicians who depend on re-election to continue in office, there have rarely been any serious attempts to manage (for which read ‘contain’) demand, and the new rhetoric is no different, continuing to use the same language as before.

Screen Shot 2018-06-19 at 08.56.342. Primary care, in the shape of general practice, is the Unique Selling Point (USP) of the NHS, managing the vast proportion of most people’s diseases (and dis-ease), but perhaps more importantly, choreographing patients’ journeys through the intricacies of institutional care to ensure that their care is appropriate in human as well as clinical terms, and preventing duplication of investigation and intervention. GPs, who are seeing little recognition of, or encouragement to treat people (and not just physical symptoms), are currently leaving practice in their droves, and recruitment is becoming ever more difficult, as their sense of overwork and under-appreciation grows. Yet general practice is barely mentioned in the rhetoric about ‘increased performance’ and ‘reduced waiting lists’.

3. Acute hospitals continue to do what acute hospitals do, which is to treat diseases, not people. Their perspective on real life, and their ability NOT to intervene are both conspicuous by their absence; surgeons measure themselves by their operations, physicians’ fingers itch to treat, and the current markers of success generally drive activity ever-upwards, rather than measuring patient outcomes and (rarely sought on an individual basis) genuine user satisfaction. Giving new money to the acute sector will merely produce more of the same, yet that is precisely what seems to be intended…. and don’t get me started on the way that mental illness is considered as an entirely separate part of the NHS…

4. As patients become medically fit for discharge from hospital, many will continue to need some sort of social support, whether in the form of occasional visits from carers, or intensive support of their long term conditions (see co-morbidities, above), and not everyone can afford to pay for it themselves. Yet funding for social care has dramatically dropped over recent years, and the drive to balance the public expenditure books as quickly as possible means that these services are rapidly disappearing, without any apparent, viable alternatives appearing. The new initiative overtly turns a blind eye to this, expecting the health system to improve without any reference to this end of the supply chain.

Only if all these factors are taken into account can we have any chance of improving the health service, but we are not seeing any evidence whatsoever of a strategic approach to public spending in general, and health services in particular. Sure, more money is required, but more thought too, and an analysis driven by logic, empathy and long term thinking, rather than tomorrow’s headline in the Daily Mail.

General Practice: Jack of all trades and master of one

The NHS media profile is dominated by hospital crises, with the rock of growing demand (based on increasing need and rising expectations) meeting the hard place of static resources.

In this ‘perfect storm’, the whole welfare state colludes in damage limitation: Social Service departments expediting the transfer of hospital patients into care homes, and GPs helping deal with patients before and after admission.

There are several dissonances here: facilitating access to hospital services jars with a ‘primary care led NHS’[1]; the episodic treatment of malfunctioning body parts isn’t ‘people based;’ and the focus on institutional services is hardly ‘care closer to home’[2].

So it seems appropriate to revisit some of these concepts and see whether and how they fit into a modern healthcare system.

At the NHS front end sits primary care, based on general practice. GPs were central to the creation of the NHS: generalists running their own (for profit) businesses, often singlehandedly. They treated whom they could and referred those they couldn’t to specialists, a balance depending on individuals’ skills and interests.

Over time, circumstances and legislation have produced larger practices, becoming more systematized and providing ever more services ‘in house’. These changes have focused largely on treating diagnoses, with less attention on looking after people who happen to be ill. The triple diagnosis[3] (the physical, psychological, and social aspects of any illness) is a key attribute of holistic care, that acknowledges that sickness is determined by more than physical symptoms: dis-ease does not equate to disease. Without acknowledging the difference, healthcare systems are doomed to treating the symptoms of ever more people without addressing their broader underlying causes.

Barbara Starfield was an eminent American researcher who understood this distinction. She researched the impact of primary care on population health in many OECD countries [4]. Firstly, she described the roles of general practice, demonstrating several unique attributes in its most effective configurations:

  • first point of access to care (hence ‘primary’ care)
  • offering comprehensive services (defined by patients’ notions of illness, not clinicians’)
  • using referrals to control access to institutional care
  • coordinating patients’ journeys, wherever in the system they find themselves

Secondly, she showed a direct correlation between primary care maturity and overall healthcare efficiency. For instance, the UK and Scandinavia have deeply embedded general practice systems, and highly cost-effective health services; the USA, in contrast, has poorly developed family practice, and the world’s most expensive healthcare, whose impact on health is disproportionately poor.

However, the current UK zeitgeist is rapidly undermining all these precepts:

  • initial access to services in acute illness increasingly seems to be through A&E departments rather than primary care
  • that care focuses on physical diagnoses, a reductive definition of ‘comprehensive services’
  • the control of spending associated with holistic approaches to care is being subsumed in the drive for measurable ‘KPIs’
  • there is little coordination of care, even within the acute sector itself, let alone across the whole health and social care system

In Starfield’s typology, the NHS is losing its inherent advantages and becoming more expensive and less effective. Could this be reversed?

The short answer is ‘yes’, but concerted efforts are required in areas including policy, resources and determination. There need to be changes to hospital services and to public attitudes, spearheaded by a significant reinvention of general practice.

In a society that values medical specialization above everything else, GPs are seen as ‘jacks of all trades and masters of none’, and are gradually evolving into ‘consultants-lite,’ increasing their technical skills and reducing their emphasis on holistic care. Policy initiatives focus largely on new technology, often in the form of tablets (pharmaceutical or electronic), and the inexorable pressure to treat symptoms rather than people becomes ever more deeply embedded.

In reality, to achieve the kind of integration described by Starfield, general practice does require Specialists, but ones who specialise in the complex field of Generalism, that vague concept that encompasses empathy, psychology, pattern recognition, synthesis, and the ability to manage both people and risk, as well as excellent clinical and organisational skills. If we really want ‘joined up’ care, then GPs need to reclaim their position as the conductors of the health care orchestra; their training will need to acknowledge and include all these skills (despite the difficulties in quantifying them), and society at large will need to rethink its attitudes to these ‘soft’ skills, and celebrate them.

For if managing heart failure is complicated, then case management and whole system co-ordination are truly complex, an order of magnitude more difficult to carry out effectively. General practice at scale has the potential to offer a genuine paradigm shift, but any mooted ‘super practices’ must be based on holistic, coordinated care if they are to succeed; ersatz out-patients clinics are the last thing we need.

[1] Department of Health (1994) Developing NHS purchasing and GP fundholding: towards a primary care-led NHS. London: DH (EL(94)79)

[2] Department of Health (2007) Shifting care closer to home; London: DH

[3] Marinker M (1981) Whole person medicine in Teaching general practice (Cormack J, Marinker M. Morrell D eds); London Kluwer Medical

[4] Starfield B, Shi L, Macinko J (2005) Contribution of primary care to health systems and health; Milbank Quarterly; 83(3): 457-502

Clinical commissioning groups: how to ensure their first birthday isn’t their last

Cake

It is more than a year since clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) formally came into existence in England, and although strategic plans are slowly beginning to emerge, CCGs continue to struggle with an infrastructure originally designed to control a national system.

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act saw CCGs as the mainspring of commissioning, capitalising on general practitioners’ twin roles: dealing with patients at the ‘front door’ of the NHS and referring and coordinating their journeys through its complex institutional pathways when necessary. The notion was that general practitioners’ (albeit anecdotal) knowledge of local services could be synthesised to inform operational and strategic commissioning throughout the NHS. Giving CCGs the freedom to change services in their local health economies was intended to encourage innovative models of care that were more user friendly and (hopefully) better value for money.

However, CCG leaders found themselves the late arrivals at a party already in full swing. NHS England had established the ground rules, subsumed specialist commissioning and primary care, and determined how CCGs should work and be managed. And adding to the harsh financial pressures, CCGs found their budgets being raided for contingency and efficiency funding as well as for augmenting specialist commissioning, maintaining pre-existing private finance projects, and supporting social care initiatives.

In terms of how to engage and enthuse newcomers, this is not what textbooks recommend, but for the current policy to work CCGs must pull their weight. How can this be achieved? CCG development seems to parallel adolescence. By the time children leave home to live independently, they need to be able to deal with the physical, financial, and emotional hurdles that they will inevitably face: they must shoulder responsibility and risk.

Similarly, CCGs were intended to assume increasing responsibility for services and develop a mature relationship with NHS England through the area teams and commissioning support units. Many have commented that this is not happening and that a form of indirect cajoling has developed instead. Despite a few signs of change (such as NHS England accepting an annual survey of its performance by NHS Clinical Commissioners), the general sense is that CCGs are under-resourced in human and financial terms and that the need to cope with what is operationally urgent is preventing them from dealing with what is strategically important. If CCGs are not allowed to develop sufficient self determination, their growing frustration and enduring dependency will drive their participant general practitioners to lose interest at best and throw adolescent tantrums at worst.

CCGs were intended to be clinically driven by autonomous professionals who function better as volunteers than as conscripts. However, such professionals (especially independent general practitioners) traditionally lack experience of corporate working, and so encouraging them to consider collective needs as well as those of their individual patients and practices is key to the success of their CCG.

This is a complex challenge that needs tackling at various levels. Overt CCG leadership requires organisational expertise as well as a thorough knowledge of local context. Many of the clinical chairpeople and accountable officers still need to learn more about strategic thinking, which takes commitment as well as protected time and funding. Whether it is even possible remains to be seen; CCGs vary greatly in their arrangements and ambitions and even the roles of clinicians and managers differ considerably.

Leadership needs to be mirrored by support among members; clinical commissioning cannot succeed without ‘grass roots’ input informing strategic thinking. Support will vary, and senior (strategic) CCG staff will have different perspectives from frontline (operational) clinicians. Such differences have never previously been bridged, and consequently individual clinical decisions have rarely influenced high level strategy. If CCGs are to exploit their potential fully, this aspect of their functioning needs a lot more development, which also takes time and money. So far, neither has been prominent, with most attention being paid to traditional senior NHS leadership, and almost none apparent to its corollary, what we might call ‘followership.’

Another obstacle to the successful development of CCGs is that the commissioning of primary care is separate to that of secondary and community services. CCGs control most of the latter two but none of the former. If a CCG decides to replace a traditional hospital service with a primary care alternative, it can decommission the first but cannot directly commission the second.

If CCGs are to hold responsibility for providing healthcare for their populations (the idea implicitly underpinning their creation), then this mismatch must be removed to give them the tools and accountability needed to provide services. If we believe in localism at all, then how they use these tools should be their decision; if they choose to provide services within their own organisation rather than subcontracting with local NHS Trusts, then that needn’t constitute a conflict of interests as long as the accountability is in place.

Outcomes such as agreed levels of morbidity, patient satisfaction, timeliness, and financial probity all offer measures of accountability irrespective of the agency involved. As it stands, CCGs are unlikely to change their paradigms of care because current mechanisms discourage change rather than rewarding it. Moreover, any existing momentum is likely to dissipate as those involved become increasingly disillusioned.

With the NHS caught between rising demand and lessening funding, the system will increasingly have to do more for less. Giving working clinicians some responsibility for achieving this, by connecting their daily activity to strategic leadership, seems logical. But CCGs will have to be supported much more emphatically, politically and operationally, if we want health service policy, local services, and the needs of the whole local population to be brought together coherently.

This is a slightly revised version of a paper prepared in collaboration with Michael Dixon, and first published in the BMJ (online 2 April 2014 as BMJ 2014;348:g2306).

Open letter to Simon Stevens

writing-query-letterDear Simon

 

Despite the fact that most open letters probably never get read by their addressees, I thought that I would join the throng of correspondents writing to you: after all, if ‘crowd-sourcing’ can raise funds and drive international campaigns, maybe it can influence policies too…

As I’m sure you’ve recognized, the NHS is in a weird place at the moment. The cognitive dissonance we all accept as part of running a state controlled (i.e. politically sensitive) system in the 21st century has reached new extremes, with the rhetoric of localism (Clinical Commissioning Groups, local choices, patient involvement) being totally at odds with the reality of national inspection regimes, the imposition of ‘Clause 119’ and the central pressure to save costs that is currently exercising us all.

The short term ‘patch it and move on’ measures of the past few years have led to so many unintended consequences that we seem to be tying ourselves into ever tighter knots physically as well as politically. Here are just three examples, but there are many more:

Emergency departments are very busy because they’re available and GPs aren’t, so we try to discourage people from attending by….extending the range of services provided at A&E.

Lewisham Hospital is really successful, so its staff are rewarded by… their assets being threatened in order to prop up the failing South London Healthcare Trust.

CCGs are tasked with responsibility for the health of their populations, and encouraged by… having their resources cut and their nascent power diminished.

And so on and so on….

If we are ever to cut through this Gordian knot, here are just a few simple principles that might help:

  1. There should be clarity about the separation between procurement and provision of services: the Government is the commissioner, and the NHS is the provider. That boundary is where the strategic overview needs to be implemented, and where the money is exchanged. The NHS is then supposed to consider how services might best be delivered, with the CCGs intended to be pre-eminent in this process, providing what services they can through their GP networks, and subcontracting the rest to agencies such as hospitals and other specialized providers.
  1. Work with human nature rather than against it: people work best when they agree with their organisation’s overall purpose and when they can see some benefit from what they are doing. Thus, a consistent approach with obvious logic works better than a series of mixed and contradictory messages, especially when those messages are clearly disingenuous and even dishonest. NHS staff don’t have to agree with everything, as long as it is clear how decisions were made, and they can rest assured that there will be consistency and stability in their working lives.

Moreover, those benefits don’t have to be financial; people join the NHS because they want to make a positive difference to the lives of ill people, and want to be proud of what they do. Approval, appreciation, peer recognition, these are all useful and not nearly as inflationary as monetary markers, whose price has to constantly increase to retain their value.

  1. Make policy and stick to it, even if the Media pundits don’t like it: democracy is great, but where long term policies are concerned, the ballot box is a better place make judgments than the daily press. Populist government leads to uncertainty and instability, and in the end, loses the respect of the populace anyway, so the system should think in years, not weeks, when it makes policy.
  1. Society needs to acknowledge the clash between rising expectations and finite resources; efficiency is clearly a good thing, but no amount of cost improvement is going to keep pace with a population that expects everything, constantly, and for free. At some stage soon, we are going to have to grasp the nettle of putting the brakes on demand, whether by formally introducing the notion of rationing, charging, or excluding.

With these suggestions in mind, Simon, perhaps you should empower the CCGs to do what they are being asked to do? That’ll mean giving them more control of (and tighter accountability for) the mechanisms and the money; they’ll need a lot more development too, internally and in the way that they deal with the rest of the service.

Perhaps too, you should think of simplifying the fog of micromanagement and punitive regulation that has descended over the NHS? At a local NHS acute Trust for instance, the 200 pages of specific measures that have to be discussed at every Quality and Safety committee bring its members to their knees. Most clinicians have a positive intent, and are prepared to have their effectiveness measured, but to do it in such prosaic, reductive ways is not only counterproductive in the short term (the measures aren’t usually helpful) but in the long term too (they de-professionalise the workforce). A few outcome measures, measured by peers and patients, would pass the responsibility and ‘ownership’ of the service back to those who are best placed to run clinical services.

Another (albeit more difficult) objective would be to resist the pressure from the acute sector; crises are always more interesting and newsworthy than chronic and often insoluble problems, but they divert attention from what is truly important to what is often merely urgent. To achieve such an objective would be countercultural in today’s world of instant gratification, but if we don’t manage to stem this tide even a little, then the future of a sustainable service is bleak.

On a more positive note, almost everyone in the NHS (and most members of the public) are aware of these issues in some way, and would be willing to throw their weight behind policies that begin to address them. Sure, the traditional tribalism of the different parts of the service will always exercise us, but there is nothing like common purpose to bring people together, and there is plenty of that where the NHS is concerned.

It’s a daunting task, that will need stamina as well as a thick skin; but modernising health services is a worthy end, and we’ll all help where we can.

Good luck, and kind regards

Jonathan

CCGs need to evolve and mature, NOW!

I have writEvolutionten before about the difference between ‘unconscious incompetence’ and ‘conscious incompetence’, and how one has to recognise a deficiency before one can address it, but I have rarely seen such an acute example as the one that currently exists in the CCG world.

As new organisations, often incorporating senior GPs with little if any experience of strategic leadership, it is perhaps not surprising that CCGs have taken time to grasp the breadth and the depth of the issues that face them; not only are they notionally responsible for an annual budget of over £60 billion of public money, they have to ensure that their own primary care house is in order, and deliver a degree of corporacy amongst their members that has never even been envisaged, never mind achieved.

However, now that they are nine months into their first ‘live’ year, one might have hoped to see more recognition of these issues, and a wealth of initiatives both locally and nationally to try to jolt the young groups into a maturity that admittedly needs to be well beyond their years. It is disappointing therefore to note that (certainly in my universe), there appears to be little if anything happening at a systemic level. The Leadership Academy seems intent on setting up a production line to manufacture senior leaders (an oxymoronic concept if ever there was one), and attracting mainly managers from provider organisations.

Others that might be expected to be compiling effective, accessible programmes to fast track CCG development (NHS Confed? BMA? RCGP? NHS Clinical Commissioners?) seem at best merely to be considering setting up such initiatives. They appear to be more concerned with meeting DH/NHS England operational edicts and maximising contractual benefits, beginning to replicate what CCGs were intended to end once and for all: doing things right at the expense of doing the right things.

In the meantime, NHS England, in its unreconstructed macho fashion, is starting to exert more direct pressure in the only language that its political masters seem able to understand: reductive operational targets. The whole notion of culture change and clinically led progress is rapidly being diluted, to be replaced by structures that will look more and more like PCTs, or the even older Health Authorities.

So what is required? The first thing is for CCGs themselves to recognise the need for internal development; even in my own small way, I have been trying to encourage the development of locally focused leadership programmes, learning sets, even stand alone workshops for CCG staff and their members to start to get to grips with the agenda, but it is proving to be a steeply uphill task. CCG chairs and accountable officers should think about resourcing such work themselves, as large scale mass produced products can never achieve the kind of cultural and organizational ‘fit’ change that a ‘bespoke’ programme can. The larger players (see above) should support and facilitate these local processes, and some central resourcing would be very helpful to oil the wheels and get the show on the road.

Do it now, applying a bit of welly to the process, and progress will be satisfyingly fast; leave it much longer, and those in the rank and file of the CCGs, the GPs who really need to ‘think differently’ to achieve systemic change, will have lost interest and gone back to the day job. Without them, not only will CCGs not succeed, the ‘supply side’ drivers (hospital crises, by and large) that have steered the NHS for so long will come to dominate even more strongly, with the only levers available to control them being the traditional blunt, insensitive, centrally controlled levers that have never really worked.

As the adage has it: ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’ Isn’t it time that CCGs started taking control of their own destinies?

Urgent or important? The CCG imperatives

CoveyI don’t usually have much time for self help books, and much of Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ is fairly self-evident; it’s not exactly rocket science.

However, his famous ‘urgent/important’ matrix does come to mind when looking at the way in which the NHS operates; indeed, the matrix seems to apply to most public services. It is a pictorial diagram (see above) which essentially divides life’s tasks into four quadrants. These range from those that are not urgent and not important, and should thus be given extremely low priority, like washing the car (pretty obvious really), to those that are both urgent and important, like putting out the chip pan fire, that need to be completed as soon as possible (not too difficult to understand either).

It’s the ones in-between that are more interesting: Covey makes the point that urgency tends to trump importance, so that tasks that are urgent but unimportant are given disproportionate priority over those that are important but not urgent, which are all too often ignored. It may be so in our personal lives, where things done for the sake of appearance are all too often given priority over the things that actually need to get done, and it certainly applies to life in the NHS.

Thus for example, reporting the handling of a patient’s complaint seems to take precedence over the handling of the complaint itself, just as when we were children, keeping our rooms tidy was seen as being more important than playing the interesting games that would get them in a mess in the first place.

Much of this dissonance comes from the issue of power and agenda setting. When we were children, it was our parents who did both, and for CCGs, it seems to be almost everyone else that has the power and drives the agenda: NHS England, the area team as their local incarnation, even the local acute Trusts seem to be able to impose their priorities onto the new clinical commissioners. This has meant that many of the CCGs have been spending the last six months adhering to due process and meeting externally imposed targets –  all of which are urgent – at the expense of maturing as commissioners, and developing their working relationships – all of which are important.

The imbalance of power that leads to this distortion of priorities underpins many relationships (personal as well as in business), but is particularly pronounced in the public sector, where political pressures (often manifested in the media) are expressed as well as financial ones. It is a truism that ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune,’ but when he who pays the piper also lays down the law and feels the need to respond to populist prejudices, then the piper is bound to find it difficult to produce new tunes or even refine the old ones.

In NHS terms, we can see the consequences of this phenomenon in a number of ways; for many CCGs, the urgent daily pressure to meet an endless series of operational targets (mainly financial, but also based on clinical and administrative activity) has subsumed the important task of developing a sustainable strategic approach to the delivery of services. The constant need to tick all the short term boxes puts at risk the underlying purpose of CCGs, which is to get to grips with the commissioning agenda: rationalising the delivery of health services so that the NHS has a chance of coping with the pressures of future demand.

The external pressures are also constraining many CCGs from prioritising their own development in terms of both time and money; many have set up novel management arrangements for their senior teams, but these need developing and honing. Perhaps more importantly, CCGs all need to work with their members to change the whole nature of the relationships between individual GP practices and their CCG, so that they fulfil the promise of marrying local implementation for their individual patients with more strategic planning for entire populations.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize other people’s policies, and the reality is that political and financial imperatives have to be met. So how can the important match the urgent? From my perspective, the answer is for the Centre (NHS England and the area teams) to forge their links with the CCGs based less on micromanaged targets, and more on agreed outcomes. Once a CCG has agreed to deliver some broad, population-based outcome objectives with an appropriate budget, then it should be left to the CCG to manage its operational delivery without its ‘parents’ looking over its shoulder all the time, and telling it to ‘go and tidy your room.’

Whether as maturing teenagers or NHS agencies, the key is to feel that we are acting on what we feel is important, not what we are told by others. If the NHS perpetuates the current situation, where CCGs are all doing what others feel to be urgent, then the future of the new system will be short lived indeed; however, if CCGs are allowed to decide their own set of urgent and important priorities within a broad national framework (and budget), then the system will do what was intended: better care, more locally and efficiently delivered, on a more sustainable basis.

A version of this article first appeared in Pulse on 24 September 2013.

Square pegs in round holes: why new structures never solve functional problems

ImageWhen you sit down for a meal, do you choose your food on the basis of the cutlery and crockery in front of you, or does your food determine your choice of utensils?

For most of us, it’s the latter; for soup we need a bowl and a spoon, a steak needs a plate and a sharp knife. What we do drives how we do it, form reflects function.

So why is it almost always the other way round in the NHS? Despite the fact that we all understand the theory, we continue to look at (and change) structures, with barely a thought given to the manner in which we would like the functions to evolve.

Thus, only recently, NHS England deputy medical director Mike Bewick apparently suggested that ‘GPs should form larger provider organisations’ in order to improve access, a structural solution to a functional problem if ever there was one. Nothing was reported on what the problems with access actually comprised, suffice it to say that larger practices were deemed to be the answer.

Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that if I want good service in my personal life, I tend to go to small providers (restaurant, butcher, vet) rather than the faceless bureaucracy I get when I deal with a mega-provider; the only advantage that they offer is lower pricing, usually at the expense of customer service.

But that specific example is missing the overarching point; to solve the GP access problem properly, we need to understand its underlying causes; the sticking plaster of any simple structural solution simply isn’t enough. If the issues are about inappropriate demands (A&E anyone?) then putting in more ‘supply’ will merely exacerbate the problem. If it is about inflexibility in skill mix adaptation, then larger practices would be a very expensive (and equally inflexible) way of solving the problem; and so on…

So why do we seem so ready to turn to structural solutions? Firstly, structures, whether physical buildings or organizational hierarchies, are easy to conceptualise, and we all prefer things to be simple rather than complicated, even if simplicity is reductive and ultimately unhelpful.

Secondly, simple interventions are usually easier to measure than complex ones, something that is particularly important to politicians, who want to be able to point at new edifices (preferably with walls, roofs and a plaque to unveil) and say ‘I did that.’

Thirdly, structural solutions calm the insecurities we all have when life changes (as long as I know where my desk is, my job must be safe) and so help us to cope with uncertainty, even if that protection is illusory.

However, apart from the fact that structural solutions are rarely more than symptom control (using a medical analogy), they also distract us from sorting out the underlying problems. If my non-steroidal medication keeps my repetitive strain injury quiet, then I don’t have to think about changing my working practice to make real changes to the way I work, thus keeping life simple, immediate, but ultimately still broken.

The only way to start solving the underlying problems of the NHS (and of most large macro-systems, for that matter), is to take a cool, dispassionate look at what we’d like the system to produce, and then work out what is required to meet that brief. Of course, much compromise and sleight of hand will still be required, as we can never really start from a blank sheet of paper once such a large system is running.

But at least we can sort out the real diagnosis and come up with a treatment plan, rather than botching yet another short term fix merely because there are twenty other similar problems sitting in the waiting room.

The best compromise may well be to carry out such ‘whole body diagnoses’ on small but complete ‘micro-systems’ (a single practice, a CCG, even a hospital Trust), rather than looking for root and branch reform of the whole creaking organization at once. As long as the analysis and the treatments in the small unit take into account its interfaces with the larger system, then one may have a way of carrying out an holistic, meaningful analysis of the functions of an entire entity, and beginning to introduce the changes needed to improve that functionality.

Not only would the scope and size of such an approach give it a better chance of being effective, it would also allow the inclusion of two other key factors vital to the success of any change management programme: ownership and ‘buy in’ from those involved, and the start of a cultural change ‘cascade’ whereby success amongst those who are in at the start of the process appeals to the later adoptors and tempts them into the programme.

So, CCG Chairs and practice managers, are you up for having your micro-system analysed and put onto a change management regime? It’d be enlightening, cost effective, and very productive.  It’s something that I would be really keen to explore; all we need now are the pump priming funds…

This article is based on a piece published in Pulse on 27 August 2013.