Healthcare has only got a unipart
The new pot of multicoloured pens on my desk betokens the fact that the Chief Executive has sent me to one of those sponsored conferences, the type where there are lots of people selling things that think giving you a pen, or (latest fad) a canvas climate-friendly bag, will get you to buy their wares. On this occasion the main sponsor was Unipart. You may think this is a vaguely familiar company name: no, not ‘Hitler has only got a Unipart’, but the car parts company that was spun off from the failing British Leyland in the 1980s. The guy from the company had a good line: ‘Rover is over’, with a missing letter in the doctored logo. Anyway, this lot have redefined themselves as a health and social care management consultancy: transferable knowledge for transplant surgery I suppose.
Actually the Unipart management consultant was the best speaker among the drones in the first half. Although I do wonder about a management technique that tells you that staff engagement is so important, but that managers need to ‘drive through’ change (although perhaps this analogy was a leftover from his car industry past). I’m afraid I’m a Toyota staff member: my accelerator’s bust. Another example of businessification: why is it assumed that some failed car company spinoff (I know Unipart was thought to be the unipart that was successful about British Leyland) has management skills in health and social care? Personally, I’d have a lot more confidence in less industry experience and more health and social care experience.
February 24th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Thanks for your comments regarding the conference you attended. You raise an excellent point regarding the benefits of utilising skills and experience from outside the health service to enable health care professionals to deliver better care for patients in a more effective manner. We’ve found that our approach to equiping people with the tools and confidence to introduce problem solving to enable people to address the minor frustrations as well as the major constraints in delivering service.Our approach, which has been used successfully across many different sectors, both public and private, promotes teamwork and builds quality into processes and is closely aligned to an organisation’s ability to be ‘innovative’. As you saw from the presentation, we’re currently working with many different health organisations teaching them how to improve their own processes and practices. The positive responses from those clinicians, nurses and administrators involved in the activity validates the view that it is best to teach healthcare professionals how to make improvements and enable them to apply their specialist knowledge rather than creating and imposing solutions that are ultimately seen as ‘not invented here.’