How to cope with failure?
First define failure.
Thomas Cook, PanAm, Enron, Compaq, DeLorean and Woolworths.
Don’t forget Bockbuster and Kodak…
… all success stories that ended badly.
Some, victims of technology and changing times. Others a shift in public taste.
It’s easy to point the finger but tougher to point to who will be the next and even harder to point out what must happen to avoid it.
The NHS is obsessed with failure. The whole regulatory regime is predicated on failure.
I can’t think of a single regulator in health and care who are interested in success, what are the ingredients for success and how to pass on the know-how to become a success.
I can’t remember a health select committee investigating success.
Politics is confrontational, the party in opposition spends the whole of its time and energy, winkling out the failures of HMG.
Paint the NHS, or social care, in a bad light… by implication you paint the government of the day in a bad light.
Finding fault. A national sport, egged on by the media.
At a time when the NHS has nothing like the number of staff it needs, and all that means for the patient experience, the CQC still turn up and say; ‘there are not enough staff…’ ipso-facto this Trust is badly run, mark it down for leadership.
At a time when the annual uplift in funding is about 3.8% and inflation is running at, probably eleven, regulators will say, the Trusts balance sheet is in a mess… it is badly run… blah… blah.
Trusts are prisoners of three things; geography, history and the economy. Three things they are powerless to change.
If a struggling Trust was a struggling branch of a national retail-chain, they’d close it.
There’s evidence a plenty in our ghost-town, high-streets.
Fashion retailers, banks, chemists all quick to close branches where it is impossible to hire staff and where the numbers don’t add up.
The NHS does not have that luxury…
… indeed, it is most likely that services in areas of deprivation, where staffing and demand costs are a problem, are the very places where Trusts will struggle.
No account is made of that.
They are victims of workforce policy, arms length organisations and politicians who have bungled workforce planning.
They are victims of the economy and have no influence over funding, allocations.
They are victims of ludicrous expectations and promises made by politicians, that they are unable to keep.
They are victims when careers are trashed because they are obliged to deliver the undeliverable.
Turning around an organisation that finds itself in a hole is not easy, particularly when regulators, NHSE regions, MPs and the press turn-up, with a JCB, to dig the hole deeper.
Nevertheless, it’s a job that has to be done. We can’t walk away and put the shutters up.
Trust-turn-around inevitably involves more money. Someone to come, with a fresh pair of eyes, to see the good the organisation is doing. New words to encourage the people, left, with no choice but to work in a ‘failing Trust’.
It takes courage, skill and talent.
Exactly how it is done is revealed in new report, that found its way to me. I’m not sure I’m supposed to have it?
It was commissioned by the fabulous Sue Holden, formerly NHSE’s National Director of Intensive Support, alas now gone.
Trust bosses Caroline Shaw, Joe Rafferty, Maggie Oldham, Simon Weldon and Sue Page told former policy wonk Paul Corrigan, in the frankest detail, what it is like to take on the task of ‘turn-around’.
The report reads like a novel.
It’s exciting, it has mystery, pain, laughter and courage. Has villains and heroes.
It talks of methodology and improvement journeys, the physical exhaustion of it all.
Overcoming denial, opening minds and giving people their self belief back.
Real leadership, the nuts and bolts of management and the psychology of success.
I have no hesitation in saying it is the best report I have read in 50 years of NHS watching.
It is a masterpiece, a must read and leaves me with the question; why didn’t we hold-on to Holden?
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
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