Cheltenham Literature Festival - Insights from the GKA team

From the challenges facing the NHS , to being diagnosed and living with Dementia, the GKA team share what they’ve learnt at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Jeremy Hunt – Zero: Eliminating preventable harm and tragedy in the NHS?

Given the relatively small part that we at GKA are privileged to play within the broader world of healthcare, it was with keen interest that Zoe Smith , Adam Irwin , and Jon went along to hear Jeremy Hunt, longest-serving Health Secretary, at the Cheltenham Literal Festival. He was primarily there in support of his book, “Zero: Eliminating Preventable Harm and Tragedy in the NHS”. A stark statistic was alleged very early on: around 150 deaths in hospitals in the UK each week are preventable. Clearly these are complex, nuanced, and emotive issues, but it swiftly became apparent that Jeremy’s core thesis is that we need more doctors and fewer targets.??

Reflecting on his own time in cabinet, Jeremy feels that the pressures of the political cauldron produce short-termism; it’s always about tackling the immediate challenge at the end of your nose, rather than a more long-term view that will work to the overall good of our healthcare system and the patient care it delivers. He championed the creation of an ‘OBR’ type of organisation for healthcare, one that would independently project and forecast where we’ll be with workforce numbers many years down the line, facilitating the necessary action being taken now to reduce the often-overwhelming pressures our healthcare professionals are under.??

He also had targets in his sights, referencing 22,000 employees in NHS England alone being solely dedicated to the monitoring and measuring of target performance, hospitals being subject to two inspections per week (of one sort or another), and GPs working under the burden of 73 targets, creating an obsession with numbers, often to the detriment of the ability to treat patients as human beings. Jeremy argued that, with the benefit of hindsight and the experience he has accumulated, we need a culture in the NHS that has the capacity and freedom to become best-in-class at learning from its mistakes, rather than a culture of fear and one in which the demands are so overwhelming that there isn’t sufficient resource to properly reflect and learn whilst maintaining the delivery of healthcare for the patients in front of you.??

The politics of healthcare will always be divisive and never short of controversy, but whatever your views on Jeremy Hunt personally, or the party politics of healthcare governance, there was much food for thought, both around the immensely admirable, tireless, and devoted efforts invested daily by our healthcare workforce and the need to address many of the challenges they face.??

Jeremy has been announced as the new Chancellor. It'll be interesting to see what he now seeks to implement in light of all he said!?

Steve Thompson – Sport and Sacrifice??

When listening to Steve Thompson discuss the process for dementia diagnosis within the UK, Olivia Cattle found it both scary and shocking to learn that dementia is the biggest killer in the UK. With 900,000 people currently diagnosed with the condition, this equates to approximately 1 dementia diagnosis every 3 minutes.?

For many people, getting a dementia diagnosis can be quite simple and take just a few weeks. For others, it can take much longer – sometimes more than a year! This is because there isn’t yet a simple test for dementia, so a diagnosis is normally based on a mixture of different types of assessments. There are many people currently campaigning for dementia to be taken as seriously as Cancer and Heart Disease and to speed up the diagnosis process in the NHS .??

What makes the diagnosis process so scary for people is the fact that the prognosis is so uncertain and that there is currently no treatment available to cure dementia. On average, a person with Alzheimer’s lives four to eight years after diagnosis, but can live as long as 20 years, depending on other factors. As you can see in programmes such as the he Dementia Choir’, many people feel so lost after diagnosis and feel as though they almost fall out of the system as there is nothing doctors can do to cure this terrible disease, which is why they look to support groups and societies to help them get through.?

Steve Thompson spoke about the fact that he feels almost guilty that he has access to some of the best private doctors due to ‘who he is’ and he wishes that everyone was able to access the same healthcare that he can.?

GKA??

Sessions such as these from the Cheltenham Literature Festival are a great complement to the knowledge the GKA team possesses within the healthcare sector. Using this knowledge, experience and our sector relationships, the GKA team are able to engage and support our respondents, as well as provide first-hand insights to inform our clients, all of which we believe results in better research outcomes. If you have an upcoming medical market research project that you would like to discuss with the GKA team, please call us on +44(0)1242 220240 or email [email protected].??