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The thing that has really really been exciting me over
the last 2-3 years, since we got our financial challenges has been
the idea that citizen engagement and working differently with people
as part of the great solution, the silver lining to the cloud of the economic recession is that we've got to think differently
about public services, and health is no different. For health
it's all about us as people, You know we can design systems and create
ways in which we mimic manufacturing industry and why we
might have the opportunity to think about how we improve our techniques
but the bottom line is, the greatest asset that we have in terms of improving health and managing our resources best
is the person themselves
and the citizens around them. So i've been really looking into some of these issues about how we connect differently
to patients and to their families. My own experience for example is that
I lost my mother about a year and a half ago,
my dad who desperately wanted to look after her at home
had to give her up actually, after 60 years of living together with 1 night apart
had to give her up and effectively say
she goes into a care home. Thats been very hard for him to take
and what it would have taken to help him keep her at home longer was
very little things like good befriending support
better continence services, the ability to lift her, really easy thing to provide
and yet the state just didn't seem to be able to connect to provide the things that he needed
instead the state provides high technical support
great and sometimes very expensive support in hospitals
or in care homes, when that little bit of extra support
as a citizen could have made all the difference.
So that started me thinking about citizen engagement and it seems to me that we could do
so much more to empower people as part of their own health
and their own families to look after each other, but actually also to engage differently
with our hospitals and our primary care, and of course the great challenge for health service professionals
is it means a shift in power
the shift in power where we as people who want to come into
the health service because we want to do good. You Know thats why we are
benign powerful people, we want to do good for people and yet we're talking
this is a transfer of power to empower the citizen or
the patient in a different way, and that is very challenging for leaders it's challenging for clinicians to find the fact that
we have to work together with citizens and patients in a different way
but my great conclusion of this work
which I think we could all spend time thinking about is the great thing about power
is that power is not a finite commodity. Effectively the more you empower somebody else in the system
in this case we empower our patients and citizens, the more power we generate overall
and I think if people could see that in the way in which they conduct their business in the
future, that by sharing power, by empowering others we create more power
then actually the health service is going to be in a great place for the future.