Health sector 2009

Happy New Year to you all from the Healthcare Practice at Interim Partners and welcome to our new blog.

In 2008 we celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the NHS and we were given a flavour of its future by Lord Darzi who presented his long awaited next stage review. In a nutshell, his aims are to make services ‘more clinically led and patient centred’. Clinicians have been promised more power, a more personalised service available to patients and providers incentivised to provide better health outcomes. This impacted the sector in the second half of the year and will continue to do so in 2009.

Like most of the country I never saw the economic events of 2008 coming and would never have guessed how they would affect healthcare organisations in 2009. It appears that the NHS like private organisations will pay for the banking sectors profligacy with reduced public spending in future years. The NHS has recently been told it will not see £1bn of the £1.8bn surplus it has created for at least the next 2 years if at all.

Sadly I have I no crystal ball, but it is safe to say in 2009 the NHS will face unprecedented challenges. There is an increased demand for health services, rising costs, uneven quality of services in different regions and often misaligned incentives. The creation of a patient led NHS and ongoing reform agenda require healthcare organisations to continually develop to achieve world class excellence in their core roles. All of this, with less money to spend to achieve their goals.

So what does this all mean for the demand for interim managers in the healthcare sector?

I think Primary Care and Acute Trusts will be the organizations most under pressure to become more efficient in 2009. These organizations are already stretched and as a result sometimes the sector lacks the expertise or resource to meet challenges. My view on the main areas/ roles they will be utilised in include; helping PCT’s commission services more effectively, in Acute trusts to transform services and improve organisational efficiency and in newly formed arms length providers bring commercial skills such as financial and marketing skills.

Where do you think the demands for interim managers will come from in 2009?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Health: Consultant - Paul Fleming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.