About 4 mins
Beyond ‘blue January’
I am writing this on ‘blue Monday’ (20 January) – the day of the year calculated as the most depressing. An almost meaningless formula underpins the calculation, including: weather conditions, level of personal debt, time since Christmas, time since New Year’s resolutions have been broken, low motivational levels and feeling a need to take action.
Originally developed to help a travel company sell holidays, blue Monday seems to have seeped into the British consciousness beyond one day of the year. In fact, ‘blue January’ or even ‘blue 2025’ if you believe some forecasts – on the economy, for example.
It's easy in this climate to focus on the challenges. To ‘polish the problems’, as the late former Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood, used to say. Or as the Prime Minister put it (rather ungenerously about civil servants) to be comfortable ‘in the tepid bath of managed decline’.
Noooo: there will be many opportunities in 2025. The task is to spot and use them.
For us, at the Foundation, we are here to build a healthier UK. That’s a grand ambition. So what are we doing in the year ahead to have impact?
Improving health and reducing inequalities
2025 will see us conclude our 18-month national Commission for Healthier Working Lives in the Spring, before beginning to deliver the action phase. The Commission, chaired by Sacha Romanovitch, will produce recommendations principally for government and employers on how to support people to stay in work rather than become economically inactive due to ill health. The work complements last year’s white paper, Get Britain Working, and the forthcoming independent review, Keep Britain Working, led by Charlie Mayfield.
We will of course be continuing analysis of inequalities in health and what to do about them, not least with our funded Scottish Health Equity Research Unit. And continuing to make the case for ringfencing government spend in health on prevention, and for prevention accounting at national and local level through our partnership with Demos, CIPFA and our work on risk factor policies. The collaboration we fund – Health Equals – will continue campaigning to draw public attention to health inequalities through its work.
Supporting radical innovation and improvement
On health care, clearly a lot of pressure on the NHS is leading to suboptimal care in some places. A key hope for the future is technology – investment, effective design, rapid evaluation and adoption at speed and scale. We will be developing our policy work on artificial intelligence – helping think through what the most effective strategy will be for health care – as well as developing our offer (funding and in-house) to evaluate technologies robustly and rapidly.
To this end we will be drawing on our assets, including our Improvement Analytics Unit, THIS Institute, and Thiscovery digital research platform in Cambridge. We will be focusing on formative evaluation to help improve the use of technology as it is being tested, using quantitative and qualitative methods as well as a quality improvement method to support progress. Through Q, we will demonstrate new approaches to improvement across local care systems, including through our partnerships with the NHS Confederation and NHS Providers. And we, like others, will help to shape the 10-Year Health Plan for the NHS on technology and the role of quality improvement.
Improving health and care policy
On our third strategic area, we have just launched a new commission on NHS productivity to provide in-depth analysis, recommendations and practical solutions for improvement. We will continue a variety of international comparative analyses on performance and system reforms, not least through our co-funding of the WHO Observatory on health systems covering the WHO European region.
We will also build leadership capability in health and care by continuing to co-fund the Harkness Fellowship programme (US oriented) and the Sciana leaders programme (a network of leaders from Germany, Switzerland and the UK). We will stay close to NHS reform and continue to analyse and advise policymakers on this. And, with the forthcoming Spending Review in mind, our REAL Centre will be modelling medium- to long-term demand and supply factors for the NHS.
All of the above will have an equity lens – so that we address key aspects of inequality in as much of our work as possible.
Looking further ahead
This year we will develop a new strategic plan covering 5 years from 2026. This will help us to set priorities and get the right balance on a number of issues. For example, how far should we allocate funding across work in and on different parts of the UK? What is the right balance between research and practical improvement programmes on the ground? And what effective partnerships should we be crafting? In short, how we can be more impactful given our investment income?
To help inform our thinking, we’ll be in touch with many of you to understand your views about us, and what we should do in the future to have most impact. We hope you will have time to help us.
The above is just a taster. Hopefully you will be seeing a lot of us through the year. So let’s look forward, work together and stop blue Monday from spreading.
This content originally featured in our email newsletter, which explores perspectives and expert opinion on a different health or health care topic each month.