Here’s the promised bumper post … two speeches for the price of one!

Last Friday, we wrote about [link] Mike O’Brien’s speech at last week’s NHS Employers conference. Two other speakers who focused on what staff can bring to the quality agenda - and how they can start thinking about delivering it with a new focus on productivity - were the Director of General Workforce, Clare Chapman and NHS Medical Director, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh.

Clare emphasised how much staff have contributed in the last year to improving the patient experience - with health care associated infections down 74%, the 18 weeks waiting time target met (and in many places down to more like eight weeks), and the new focus on helping people to live longer, healthier lives, NHS staff have embraced the quality agenda and really pushed it forward. Furthermore, Clare pointed out that the commitment to the NHS Staff Survey makes it much easier for us all - staff and patients alike - to measure how well we are doing against the pledges in the NHS Constitution.

By improving staff wellbeing (Clare cited the Boorman report), and creating Talent and Leadership Plans, the NHS continues to put its staff in the driving seat in the journey towards quality. All these improvements are the hugely strong foundations, Clare argued, on which our continued and accelerated improvement will be built - and it is this improvement which will help the NHS of the future meet the quality and productivity challenge. Clare had five areas of emphasis on this front: changing mindsets (really believing quality and value can go hand in hand), “getting on with it now”, a unique role for HR in setting the tone, all staff working across boundaries to integrate services, and making staff wellness everyone’s business.

By working in flexible partnership towards a clinically-led NHS, quality and value can and will go hand in hand. Bruce Keogh focused on bringing clarity to these ideas - emphasising the roles of quality standards and NHS Evidence in providing a clinically-led NHS with the tools it needs to measure and secure quality. Like Clare, he contrasted the NHS today with his experiences 10 years ago, admitting that he felt himself to be providing a “third world” service to his cardiology patients prior to the NHS reforms of recent years, transforming cardiac surgery waiting times from up to two years to a matter of weeks.

Bruce’s speech concentrated on the importance of every member of NHS staff being able to provide high quality care to all, reducing the social and geographical inequality that sees the poorest living shorter and less healthy lives. The patient experience, safe environments, and effective clinical outcomes are the three keys to providing that quality care, and the manner in which the NHS is able to define quality is both unique in the world and a key strength going forward. “Quality is systemic,” he said, and enabling every arm of the NHS to identify and deliver quality, and freeing them to innovate to deliver the right care at the right time, is the means to providing high quality care for all.

Essential to all this, both Bruce and Clare argued, was clinical management and leadership, which has the potential to offer a clear vision and a system-wise view powerful enough to achieve the changes necessary to meeting the quality and productivity challenge. Bruce Keogh in particular admitted that clinicians are cynical about the Department of Health and what they see as big picture initiatives. One of the key challenges for the future, then, will be to enthuse clinical leaders and harness their energy and desire for clinically led change. Quality, innovation and leadership, he insisted, are inextricably linked in successful commercial organisations - and the financial climate is so severe that the NHS must respond as it never has before. Sir Bruce concluded that the quality and productivity challenge offers “one of the biggest opportunities” the NHS has ever faced. Every speech at the NHS Employers conference signposted the way forward, and the means by which NHS staff can grab those opportunities with both hands.