In anticipation of the NHS Confederation Conference

I am attending the NHS Confederation Conference this week. The conference has a reputation as the must attend event in healthcare. There are many others, but amongst my clients and colleagues the Confederation conference is regularly mentioned as top of the list in the sector.

With the coalition starting to flex its muscles, health policy is moving fast. We are very much in that stage where Ministers announce the direction of travel, and the service attempts to turn to meet it - often the very demonstration of ‘turning the oil tanker’ to use a well worn phrase.

There are several subjects that I want to hear more about, including:

• The role of the patient - ‘the needs of the patient come first’ (as the Mayo Clinic famously puts it) is always the top of the list for any public statement on health. What changes is the level of dedication to this statement and what mechanisms are used to encourage NHS staff to do it. Andrew Lansley is no different to his former Secretaries of State in stating that he wants care to be patient-centred. Really understanding the needs of patients in a time when NHS Trusts are economically challenged is one of the real drivers of change for me. But how seriously will the service take it? Is it incentivised in the right way? How will managers be rewarded for giving patients what they want? And most of all, will the NHS continue to be opened up to a market, so that the choices of patients and good word of mouth about services can be rewarded?
• The GP as king - Another announcement from the coalition is that the GP will be responsible for a large proportion of NHS spending, and will play a lead role in commissioning. This poses huge challenges for NHS organisations, in particular those delivering services. My team and I regularly work with organisations to help them understand GPs, who in my experience are probably amongst the hardest groups to engage with given their lack of time and the approaches made to them by so many organisations. If the GP is to be the centre of the service (after patients of course), anyone delivering health care will need to know how to find out what they want.
• The dreaded cuts - will ‘doing more with less’ be the mantra that kickstarts NHS innovation? Is there now an impetus to act to make the service more efficient and customer orientated? Or will having to get by with even less available funding result in a depressed health service driving quality down and just getting by? There are exciting opportunities in vertically integrated care, and organisations in healthcare are starting to look at merger options. Our experience in Further Education gives us an interesting angle on the benefits of merging organisations and how crucial public and stakeholder engagement is to getting the configuration of merged organisations right.

So plenty to look forward to at the most challenging time for the health service in 15 years. I’ll be updating this blog from the conference, and you can also follow me on Twitter: @jwpgriffiths

Related articles from Jake on the FreshMinds blog:

• Good customer service: Just what the doctor ordered?
• NHS marketing: the stuff of nightmares?
• Quality, customer care and Mr Burnham’s mistake
• Chuchill, Fukuyama and the end of NHS history

About the author

Jake Griffiths heads up the FreshMinds Healthcare research team. Jake has been with FreshMinds since 2003, and previously worked at the FTSE 100 firm BHP Billiton and the accountancy Baker Tilly in research and information roles. His recent work in patient experience includes working with NHS Sefton and NHS Lambeth to improve service quality by accessing the opinions of patients through innovative research techniques.