With year-on-year increases in demand and the imperative to reduce its deficits, the NHS must look beyond merely doing more of the same if it is to become sustainable. Never has the need to redesign services been more important. The NHS Five Year Forward View contains an explicit expectation for the system to innovate and redesign but, three and a half years in, and for a variety of different reasons, service redesign is still not mainstream. So, how can pharma help the struggling NHS achieve what’s needed by the five-year point and how will the different stakeholders involved benefit?
The key is to deploy skills and experience that are core to pharma operations, ie strategic and systematic planning and communications. Forming redesign partnerships and implementing effective redesign programmes will help the NHS continue to do the day job, achieve KPIs while streamlining pathways, improve productivity and efficiency, reduce clinical variation and waste and improve overall patient outcomes. And all that should add up to a more financially viable NHS.
Various different elements are pivotal to the success of such service redesign programmes and are currently often forgotten in the busy NHS. Systematic planning and ongoing communications are key. Compile a strategic matrix of all relevant stakeholders, including patients and carers, consult them all as part of the planning process and then show you listened to their feedback. Systematically plan who needs to be told what, when and how – and stick to it. Use clear communications throughout, avoiding jargon at all costs. Using case studies of previous redesign successes, brought to life by patient stories, can really help motivate others to persevere with their own redesign programmes.
But what’s in all this for pharma I hear you say? In the past solutions have been offered that simply met pharma’s own organisational and strategic needs. But a new approach is now needed, that really helps the NHS achieve its key priorities. And in doing so invaluable relationships and trust will be formed and being seen as a redesign partner of choice will set pharma companies apart.
Peter Dommett is managing director of mXm Group and Jacqui Lyttle is strategic consultant of mXm Health Consulting
