The Health Foundation’s Chief Executive Stephen Thornton yesterday highlighted the common challenges facing hospitals in the UK and Malawi, in a new section on the Health Service Journal (HSJ) website. The Health Foundation has been selected by the HSJ to share its experience of best practice with the journal’s readers.
In the first of a five-weekly series on good management in the NHS, Stephen describes a recent visit to a Health Foundation project in Malawi. In spite of their very different political, economic and geographical environments, he was struck by how hospitals in Malawi and the UK face similar challenges in making care safer for patients.
“In the hospitals I visited I heard Malawian clinical teams and managers telling me about problems to do with finances, hygiene, waste disposal, equipment, data capture, transport, logistics and staffing,” Stephen said. “Many of the same issues are raised by the UK professionals involved in our Safer Patients Initiative.”
“These were desperately resource-poor settings,” he continued. “Yet even here, pumping more money into the system wouldn’t necessarily mean safer hospitals.”
Stephen’s suggestions for improvement include developing strong leadership that challenges frontline teams to focus on and prioritise safety issues, allowing them to find their own innovative solutions to operational problems.
The new HSJ Good Management section also covers how The Health Foundation used this year’s party political conferences to explore the impact national clinical measurement schemes are having on the NHS and new research showing how patient involvement can improve the quality of healthcare.
For more information, visit HSJ online.