It's all about people... meet NHG's Henry Pesonen

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Henry...

Management consulting is actually my second career. My first career was in the hospitality industry where I worked as a chef in Michelin star restaurants in four different countries. Eventually, I wanted to find new challenges in my life and applied to university. When I was finishing my studies, I was pondering job options for business school graduates and chose consulting since it sounded challenging and interesting.

What’s your ‘why’?

When I was still working as a chef, at some point, I felt that maybe a person can do more valuable things in his or her life than prepare expensive meals for people who can afford to pay for them.

From those times I remember seeing a documentary on empires collapsing in history. One of the early signs was that food became art – something to play with - instead of nutrition. This made me think that I want to do something with more meaning to the society around us.

Before joining NHG, I worked at other bigger consultant companies – I liked the culture there, but the work was still lacking the greater purpose for me. At NHG I feel that I’m doing meaningful work to society, and I hope that I have done something more for us all.

What’s the biggest challenge we face in health and social care today?

This is a very difficult question. I refer to associate professor and colleague Paulus Torkki on the topic of prioritization in health and social care. I find the biggest challenge is to combine peoples’ growing expectations for services and the limited resources. People have high expectations and decision-makers want to comply with these needs, but they must have information on where to put the limited resources.

It requires new ways of thinking how to organize and deliver social and healthcare and it’s a balance act where new ways of working and new tools, expectations management and preventive healthcare plays a big role in the solution.

For example, diabetes is very costly for society, but we invest little in it and its prevention because it is not so much in the news. At the same time, we have invested a lot of money and resources in COVID both in Finland and globally and those investments have been widely accepted by the general population.

How are you rethinking healthcare in your day-to-day work?

Much of my time goes to hospital planning and its internationalization. I focus on questions like, what the hospital of the future looks like, how we are constructing hospitals, and what new ways of designing, planning, and constructing hospitals are. We need to make hospitals and healthcare centers future proof, so they can adjust to changing service needs. Hospitals shouldn’t be isolated islands inside the society or social system, but we need to consider how to build them as a natural part of the system. Also, we need hospitals that serve both patients and their closed ones but also the professionals working there.

The other topic I’m engaged with is building the new wellbeing service counties and the health and social care reform in Finland. As the counties started out on 1st of January, there are big challenges ahead. In the short term they include, for example, stabilizing operations and handling urgent issues, making sure citizens are getting the needed services, the contact channels are working, and the personnel is getting paid. In the long term we need to make sure that everyone understands and agrees on what the goals and the methods to tackle the biggest issues are.

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