Robert Townsend, in his 1970 book, “Up the Organization”, said that “consultants are people who borrow your watch and tell you what time it is.” I have never been very insulted by this view. Sometimes it is not that easy to read your own watch and when you have 1.3 million watches in your organisation, it can be a real challenge.
Diagnosis' recent piece of work with the King’s Fund is a good example. When they asked us to deliver a report on the secondary care doctor’s role in improving productivity in the NHS, we didn’t make it up ourselves, we asked the experts: a group of junior doctors in Newcastle, a group of consultants in London, a group of clinical managers in Manchester, negotiators with the BMA and NHS Employers, the head of Connecting for Health, and others working in the NHS.
We triangulated these views from the real world with the ideas laid out in the academic literature, so that we could assess feasibility as well as effectiveness.
By the end of the exercise, we had identified broad themes, each with practical suggestions and likely challenges. Far from regurgitating our own individually limited knowledge, we found ourselves surprised by many of our findings. Ideas from very different sources came together, generating novel and synergistic possibilities.
The final report, due to be published shortly, is essentially borrowed from the many individuals who participated in the interviews and focus groups, and from the literature that we reviewed, but it provides a new view on the role of doctors in improving NHS productivity.
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