Best practice not being sufficiently replicated

‘Efficient productivity through innovation’ was the theme of the first ever Hospital Innovations conference and exhibition at Olympia, London in late April. At the two-day event – supported by organisations including IHEEM, the Legionella Control Association, the Water Management Society, the BRE, and a sizeable number of English NHS Trusts – the Day Two keynote address by Lord Carter very much reflected this theme. Following his address at Healthcare Estates 2015, the Labour Peer focused further in London on his team’s recent review of the ‘productivity and efficiency’ of English NHS Trusts, and explained how the initiative would progress in coming months. One of his key conclusions was that while the NHS consistently rates as one of the world’s most efficient public health systems, innovation and good practice are rarely sufficiently shared or widely replicated service-wide, resulting in a considerable ‘gap’ between the best and worst-performing Trusts. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Lord Carter first spoke to IHEEM members about his team’s work reviewing the ‘productivity and efficiency’ of English NHS acute Trusts in a presentation at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2015 conference (HEJ – January 2016), discussing he and his team’s findings after examining the ‘operational productivity’ of 22 NHS Trusts across England, and highlighting some of the areas with the greatest scope for improvements as set out in his initial review, Review of operational productivity in NHS providers, Interim report, published last June. This review suggested that given sufficient commitment, and action in areas ranging from making more productive use of staff to improving estate utilisation, acute NHS Trusts could reduce the NHS’s costs by around £5 bn annually by 2019/2020. Lord Carter’s follow-up and ‘final’ review, published in February, confirmed that by addressing the ‘unwarranted variations’ his team had uncovered in ‘productivity and efficiency’ across all the major NHS resource areas, the service’s annual bill could indeed be cut by the £5 bn predicted. 

Speaking on Day Two of Hospital Innovations 2016 – organised by the same Step Exhibitions team that co-ordinates IHEEM’s annual Healthcare Estates event – Lord Carter gave an interesting update on he and his team’s findings and conclusions, and their continuing work with acute Trusts across England. He acknowledged that it would take substantial commitment and effort, particularly from the least ‘productive and efficient’ Trusts, to achieve the cost reductions of the scale outlined in his two reports. However, if the NHS was to remain sustainable, the only alternative if such efforts did not bear fruit would, he believed, be rises in taxation.