Daily Insight: Confed clashes

There will be many absentees at this year’s NHS Confederation conference, with the British Medical Association’s junior doctors’ committee opting to plan its walkout at the same time. 

Confed chief executive Matthew Taylor told HSJ they had considered postponing the conference but that they opted to press ahead with the annual gathering following consultation with members.

In a pre-conference interview with HSJ, he also warned that Rishi Sunak’s flagship waiting list reduction target may not be “the most sensible target [or] within the service’s control” and reflected on a “bruising” planning round.

Indeed, those that do make the trip will most likely find a sombre mood, despite the cheery weather forecast for Manchester this week, with the service still in a seemingly perpetual state of crisis, exacerbated by a pay dispute which shows little signs of being resolved.

Some leaders will take a dim view of the event still going ahead and fear pictures appearing in the more sceptical parts of the media of NHS executives chinwagging while strikes cause widespread cancellations of vital operations and appointments. 

But others argue that the planning which goes on to ensure strikes are as safe as possible starts well before the actual strike days themselves, while the real impact lingers long after the actual industrial action ends.

And, just perhaps, getting together and sharing some ideas and experience with others in the same boat may prove a valuable exercise which the wider NHS will benefit from.

There are merits to both arguments.

What took you so long?

An independent review into University Hospital of the North Midlands’ management of their elective waiting list has highlighted how easily the volume of “long waiters” can be misrepresented.

The trust commissioned a consultant to undertake the work (rather quickly completing it in just over a couple of months) after some unexpected increases in the number of 78-week and 104-week waiters.

UHNM’s openness in publishing the results of the review should be noted, as there are surely others who have done similar pieces of work but not put the results in the public domain.

The report was clear; UHNM’s list may have inadvertently been inflated by data errors and it recommended immediate training of the workforce in referral to treatment and restriction of access to systems, along with a mass validation exercise.

There was also a hint at criticism of NHS England’s “attempt to triangulate the contents of the return with other information sources, often unvalidated sources or snapshots taken at different time periods”.

Regardless of who else might be to blame for the potentially inaccurate growth in long waiters, UHNM has a big validation exercise ahead, and a new chief operating officer to recruit.