What happens when there is no NHS operating plan

This is not a theoretical exercise. There is currently no operating plan for NHS Financial Year 2024/25.

And so we wait. Tick, follow, tock, follow, tick, follow...

It's not usually like this.

It usually runs like clockwork being published on the 23rd December, before we all toddle off for a break.

Well apart from doctors and nurses, who are still very busy during our time of overeating and drinking, and working on our future lifestyle diseases.

For the NHS it's a great time to put the plan out because the media is too busy reporting on sightings of reindeers and Elves loose in New York etc.

Then provider and system leaders return and start looking at what 'up top' needs them to do, before they start signing off their business cases, and plans for the next year.

But it hasn't arrived.

Two months later. Gulp.

I know what you're thinking, surely it got lost in the post with all those Christmas cards with second class stamps that are now starting to arrive.

Nope it's still not here and there are five years left, and so everyone is...

... waiting to agree plans for a year ahead which, pandemics aside, will be one of the most critical in the history of the NHS (which successively seems to be every year).

Once it drops, in a year where Easter lands early, it's going to be a mad rush to get things in place.

Now the most likely reason is that because the NHS system and trust deficits are spiralling, (which of course is nothing to do with local organisations having to accommodate pay rises and inflation), when NHS England has made it clear that organisations must hit their budgets.

It is an election year after all.

So it's likely that with so much flux, SOS, DHSC and NHS E are holding off until the picture becomes more clear.

What this means for you

That if you are also waiting for answers about business cases, contracts or tenders and whether your solution may be commissioned next year, then you're likely going to have to do some waiting too, followed by a chaotic, frantic horse infused ending to the financial year

It also means that the knock on effect due to the lack of clarity on what next year looks like for the NHS organisation you work with, will likely create turbulence for everyone involved.

My late father, who possibly held the Guinness World Record for being the most last-minute oriented person in the history of mankind, used to tell me as a child, before I had a grasp on the definition of irony, that "preparation is nine tenths of the job".

Or to borrow from a more credible source: "Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder." - Mason Cooley

Which is something we could all really do without.