_The big issue


MEASURING THE COST OF POOR COMMUNICATION A report just published by Marie Curie Cancer Care argues that better communication between healthcare professionals and patients can actually improve health outcomes, and save the NHS money. It suggests that the true cost of poor communication – in the form of poor adherence to medication regimes, repeat visits to clinics, disputes and litigation – could be as high as £1 billion per year. Many of the tools for improving communication are already in place – training, the deployment of clinical nurse specialists, simple decision aids and prompts – but the report calls for the NHS to go further and develop a robust business case for improved communication to ensure it is embedded at every level.


A long and winding road: Improving communication with patients in the NHS is available to download at www.mariecurie.org.uk


oogle any of the names of the hospitals caught up in the recent healthcare scandals – Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust,


Morecambe Bay, Winterbourne View – and the results make for grim reading, with headlines that speak of ‘disastrous’ failures in care, and a culture that had come to accept substandard performance as the norm. But what is perhaps most shocking is the apparent lack of compassion shown by staff towards patients. How did our cherished health service reach the point where nurses and other staff can no longer be relied on to care? It challenges our most basic assumptions about the so-called


14_South Bank | Spring 2016


‘ Success increasingly came to be based on what could be measured. That led to a distortion of priorities and less attention being given to non-targeted activities. The patient experience got pushed down the agenda’


caring professions, and our expectations of our beloved NHS. For Professor Lesley Baillie (pictured above),


Florence Nightingale Foundation Chair of Clinical Nursing Practice, the reality is – inevitably – somewhat more complex and nuanced than the media coverage might suggest. She believes that to find the root causes of the failings highlighted in these and other cases, we need to go back to the 1990s, when healthcare first became predominantly target-driven: an ideological shift often associated with the Conservative administration but in fact bolstered to a significant extent by the Blair government that swept into power in 1997.


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