News Article

Candesic attended a thought-provoking breakfast roundtable this week focused on leadership and management in healthcare.

The Chatham House Rule was in play, but we can raise a few issues that spring from conversations with a wonderfully diverse, well-informed and amiable cohort about how the healthcare landscape might look post-election. Some questions for you to ponder…

• If Labour comes to power, it has been in the wings a very long time, and will likely want to hit the ground running. But how? Reorganisation takes time, and that delay could be unappealing in the short term. Performance management could be one way?
• Is it safe to assume such money as there is will likely go on tackling waiting lists in the first year or two, leaving little additional funding elsewhere?
• If the economy does not improve after that, where will additional funding be found?
• Will there be less tolerance of NHS overspend?
• Social care needs to be part of any new government’s health reform – but has anyone truly priced it in?
• Could waiting lists be tackled by a move towards value-based contracts, or is that a policy unicorn?
• Will the pendulum of power swing to providers as waiting lists are tackled?
• Could we see a new balance between collaboration and competition? Might we be looking at a new form of PPP?
• With over a quarter of all GPs 50+, does this require action (an emergency taskforce, say?) now?

This also made us think – some interesting reading here from Nicholas Timmins writing for The King’s Fund, the independent charity working to improve health and care in England.