NHS 'following route to failure'

Thursday, 30 July 2009 12:02 AM

By politics.co.uk staff

The NHS is ticking every box on the route to business failure, a thinktank has claimed.

Civitas' report, Putting Patients Last, assesses the performance of the NHS compared to business guru Donald Keough's 'ten commandments of business failure'.

It finds the NHS is sticking to all ten commandments, after successive waves of government reform have viewed it as a business or series of businesses.

Among the commandments are being inflexible, assuming infallibility and not taking time to think.

Loving bureaucracy, sending mixed messages and being afraid of the future are also included.

Peter Davies and James Gubb argue a failure to back people rather than processes is behind these problems.

"It is time for the government to stop overestimating the importance of legislation, crude measurement and regulation as markers of success and put faith in power of frontline organisations to drive quality," they said.

"The autonomy associated with a more business-like framework means nothing if all it is used for is finding more innovative ways of meeting central targets."

The claims range from specific to the general. The third commandment, 'isolate yourself' is reflected in the allegation that health care is conducted in silos, particularly between primary and secondary care.

The first commandment, 'stop taking risks', is reflected in a 2006 Office of Government Commerce study which gave the NHS just two out of five points for seven of the nine categories it assessed.

'It's so easy [for organisations] to lose sight of the customer, to think dispassionately about an amorphous mass called the market or market segment," Mr Keough said in a foreword to the book.

"There are, except as statistical abstractions, no such things as market segments. There are only people. They have faces."

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