The Health Foundation has celebrated its tenth anniversary with a reception featuring an address by Don Berwick, President of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Many of the partners, advisers and collaborators working with the Foundation on its range of programmes joined civil servants and healthcare professionals to celebrate the achievements of The Health Foundation over its first ten years as a charitable trust.
The reception was held in the Science Museum’s Making the Modern World Gallery this autumn. In his keynote address, Don Berwick transported guests along the journey of the UK’s healthcare over the past decade. He used the analogy of a love affair to explain his affection for the NHS. ‘The NHS is such a seductress’ Don said, because of its ‘clarity of purpose; aggregated financing; political accountability; centralised stewardship; the heritage of strong primary care; and the explicit commitment to equity and justice.’
Speaking of its achievements over this ‘amazing decade’ Don said ‘between about 1998 and 2008 the UK accumulated more knowledge and more expertise per capita than almost any other nation I know about how to improve healthcare as a system.’
Don spoke of the UK’s many pioneering hospitals, trust providers and commissioners who are finding new ways of providing high-quality care to patients. Many of these are those working with The Health Foundation on its groundbreaking programmes.
‘They’re testing [new care designs], making them work and offering informative examples of breakthroughs’, said Don. Describing the achievements of the sites working on the Health Foundation’s Safer Patients Initiative, delivered by IHI, he said, ‘They are achieving breakthrough results and I guarantee they are currently at world class levels.’ Don cited the Health Foundation Quality Improvement Fellows, who spend a year in the US working and training with the IHI, as ‘rapidly emerging as new leaders for improvement in the UK’.
Looking to the future, Don concluded by saying ‘For the long haul I am not at all worried. History so often predicts the future, and your history thrills me: I am still in love. You are the nation that promises equity, access, universality, justice and care … that is good enough to ask who gets left out and is good enough to stop it. … that brings science to service.’
Health Foundation chairman David Carter said: ‘[Don] brings insights that no one else brings to bear on what’s happening to health and healthcare in the British Isles. We have been privileged as a Foundation to work with him.’
Sir David also paid tribute to the many other people the Foundation is privileged to work with, and thanked Health Foundation chief executive Stephen Thornton for giving the Foundation strategic vision, drive, energy, coherence and focus.
