Health Adviser

Health Adviser is an industry publication, produced by DAC Beachcroft, providing insight, foresight and thought-provoking features and articles that provide practical solutions for the issues of the day, for health and social care professionals.

Welcome to the latest series of Health Adviser, January 2021

It will come as no surprise that, at this time of enforced adaptation and transformation, Health Adviser is focusing on the macro theme of the ‘next normal’ in healthcare. The impact of Covid-19 extends far beyond our sector, but we are uniquely positioned in being the ‘front line’ of this pandemic. The provision of healthcare and attitudes towards health and care are both impacting, and being impacted by, Covid-19.

But how is this manifesting itself, and what comes next?

In the last edition of Health Adviser, we talked about the excellence of our UK healthcare services and recognising its active efforts to be the safest health service in the world. Since then, of course, those two statements have been put to the test more than at any other moment in recent memory. In a truncated timeframe, leadership figures have been forced to adapt at a rate and on a scale that has never been seen before. It has been, and continues to be, a test like no other.

The strain that the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust upon healthcare systems around the wider world has caused a radical reset of priorities and longer-term planning. In response, healthcare providers both public and private have come together to unite against the existential threat of a global virus that jeopardises patient health, safety and wellbeing, as well as having a crippling effect on national and global economies.

As we saw in the wake of the global financial crisis, those economic shockwaves guarantee that the healthcare fallout from coronavirus will last long into the future. As with any shock event, there are phases of response. Initial fire-fighting and emergency frameworks begin to make way for roadmaps to recovery, but the combination of new, Covid-related (or Covid-accelerated) issues and a patient backlog that has stacked up due to the redirection of resource and effort mid-pandemic, means new thinking is required.

With this in mind, we analyse the coming crises in mental health, impacting both patients and the workforce, and the capacity conundrum associated with waiting lists that stand in the millions. The size of the task must not be underestimated. But there are encouraging signs.

In many ways, the crisis has provided the opportunity for us to showcase a spirit of innovation and appetite for adaptation – the benefits of which will not only assist in short-term resilience building, but extend far beyond into the ‘next normal’.

We therefore also explore how collaboration, culture and mindsets, technological uptake and removal of bureaucracy are impacting everything from MedTech to infrastructure, and look at the lessons learned from the approaches of national and international leadership figures.

With the help of a range of specialists from public and private healthcare, policymaking, the law and academia, as well as non-healthcare sector specialists, we hope this collection provides insight to see through the mist, foresight to inform decisions around ‘what comes next’, and the practical solutions to turn the creative thinking and mindset for innovation that 2020 has brought, into tangible outcomes that benefit patients and healthcare workers alike.

  Nigel Montgomery, Head of Health