As a company currently working with providers to improve the delivery of care – cost, quality, and performance – we see our clients attempting to juggle the avalanche of guidance, recommendations and policies from various professional bodies, unions, and from NHSEI.
It sits uncomfortably with us that some have interpreted this information and concluded that, in the pursuit of trying to keep patients and staff safe as a result of the pandemic, the throughput and capacity of a department needs to be reduced. In most cases, this cannot be furthest from the truth.
What happened to the ‘new normal’ that we heard about, where red tape and bureaucracy for it’s own ends were cast aside and abandoned in the spirit of ‘ all hands to the pumps’? What happened to counting, measuring, and looking for different ways of doing things? Was that cast aside too in the race to be fee of these bonds of the rigid past? Surely it’s not right that we can simply, at the wave of a couple of keys on a keyboard see, treat, and help less people as compared to before the pandemic. It’s incredibly frustrating that the lessons learned from the phenomenal work displayed by thousands of NHS staff up and down the country are completely being discarded. Let’s not forget the many patients that were discharged, the staffing ratios that were changed, an entire hospital being built in a week that goes to show what can be achieved with the resources we have, and a bit of creative thinking, tenacity and courage.
Why are we not even trying to establish the truth, by firstly examining how long things take, how many times they will occur, who needs to do them, why it needs to be done, and the process of how things need to be done for the purposes of trying to find a way to do more with the same resource?
The one precious thing we so fondly clapped our hands for each Thursday , are the people working at the frontline of our NHS and Care Services. We squander and waste their precious time whilst simultaneously failing to deliver care to those who need it when we start to arrive at conclusions such as these, without firstly even making an attempt to find out what is true, let alone be creative in how we think.
Let’s get back to basics, please?
Muhammad Haji
Director, Meridian Productivity
