‘How healthy is your horse?– the future of the NHS’

In it, Nick Hulme, chief executive of East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust, and STP lead for Suffolk and North East Essex STP, took a forthright look at the NHS’s current workings, and argued that while the service might be ‘perfectly designed for the staff working in it’, significant change is needed to ensure that patients are optimally served. This required far less focus on individuals working for ‘organisations’, and greater buy-in to a wider ‘system’, encompassing not just the medical profession, but also the third sector, councils, and others organisations operating collaboratively.

Introducing Nick Hulme as ‘one of the NHS’s most well-respected chief executives’, IHEEM’s  President,  Pete Sellars, said the Institute had been delighted when he had agreed to ‘share  his thoughts about the NHS’ on the opening day of this year’s Healthcare Estates conference. Nick Hulme, who had been ‘delighted’ to be asked to speak, said he had received a substantial number of emails and texts since the title of his presentation had been announced in HEJ and on the Healthcare Estates 2018 website from people curious as  to  what he would be discussing, but added that that ‘would soon become clear’. He said: “The NHS is to me the  most  important and special thing medically in the UK; it is unique. I have had the privilege of working internationally, and when I talk to people about the anxiety they have  when  they get ill – often driven almost entirely by the cost of their treatment rather than their illness itself – it is truly remarkable to think what we all achieve for the 1.3 million people whose lives the NHS improvesevery day, via a healthcare system that is still free at the point of delivery.”

While thus extremely proud of the NHS, Nick Hulme said he believed the service faced a number of notable issues currently. He expanded: “The service was designed when the average age was 64, and now, where I live, that average age is closer to 85. The system and processes haven’t fundamentally changed, and the science of treatment is extraordinary, but the NHS needs to change – by this I mean that while the service is perfectly designed for the people who work in it, it is not designed around the users.”