Today was an especially interesting one.
All days are interesting and every day I learn something of great value and today was no different.
But today was in a different league!
My job today was to deliver health care. I am a surgeon. I perform operations that are intended to improve the health of the people who place their trust in me.
Patients.
But I was only able to deliver three operations today. Usually I would do eight. Normally I would use every precious minute of operating theatre time.
But today, half of that (very expensive) time went unused. It was paid for but it was wasted. The whole theatre team were idle. And patients needing operations were waiting too. Lose, lose.
And the reason?
The day surgery unit in my hospital was being used for something that it was not designed for. It was being used by non-surgical patients.
And that was the best of a bad job because the alternative was those non-surgical patients would otherwise have been lying on trolleys in corridors.
But how could frail elderly medical emergency admissions spill over into the day surgery unit?
Because the current design of the health and social care system guarantees that will happen. That was not the intention, but it is the impact of the policies that dictate how the system behaves.
So, to fill in the idle time while unable to operate (and after deleting all the spam email and processing the non-spam email) I looked at jobs on the NHS jobs website.
This is a behaviour I have observed many times, and to-date I have not indulged in it, but today I was idle, and I was irritated, and I was curious to see what I might find.
And I quite quickly came across a job for a “STP Programme Director” with an eye-watering, five-figure salary! H’mmm …
STP is shortcut for “Sustainability and Transformation Plans” and, forgive me for appearing skeptical but, that sounds rather familiar.
But, ever wary of the dangers of pre-judgement, I dug deeper into the online information to learn more.
And I downloaded the STP for our local health care economy, all 80-pages of it, and I even had time to read it.
The offered purpose made complete sense to me.
A vision of an integrated health and social care system that converts public cash into public contentment. Fantastic! Sign me up to that!!
What I was less able to make sense of was the process for delivering the dream.
The job of the STP Programme Director seemed to be “to bring all the separate parts of the current system together and to weld them into a synergistic whole“.
That would be the perfect job for someone who sees the whole as greater than the sum of the parts, and someone with the skills and experience to do that. Someone like a systems engineer. A health and social care systems engineer.
My interest was growing!
And it was at that point that I felt the emotional pain of disappointment.
There was nothing new in the JD or the STP that even hinted at “how” this wonderful vision would be achieved. All I found was the well-worn “CIP and QIPP” language.
That, forgive me for saying, does not seem to have delivered so far. Apologies for the reality check.
Oh well! Never mind. My skepticism had prepared me for disappointment.
Ah! Here is the next patient. Time to wield the scalpel and to actually deliver some health care. A much better use of my time than web-surfing, eh?
But the idle time was not completely wasted. I did learn much but from the opportunity to experience the streeeeetch between the NHS reality and the NHS rhetoric.
Every day is an opportunity to learn something. You never know what will turn up tomorrow.