A festival of networking and extra-marital sex: it's ConfedExpo time again!

Spare a thought for the secretary of state.

Whatever your view of Steve Barclay, it must be miserable to wake up in the morning knowing that you have a meeting with NHS Confederation boss Matthew Taylor demanding “clarity” about something.

In the village drama of the NHS, Mr Taylor would be the well-meaning but rather tiresome vicar’s wife dropping in to ask the squire about repairs to the church roof or to complain about deer straying into the vicarage garden. One last role for the great Penelope Keith, perhaps.

This week Mr Taylor has been demanding clarity about waiting list targets and funding plans. He wants to know “exactly what the government means”. You have to admire his optimism.

Best-behaved dog

Mr Barclay should be safe for the rest of this week as Mr Taylor is busy running the tombola and judging the best-behaved dog competition at the NHS Confederation’s summer fete, or what it prefers to call its annual conference.

Some HSJ readers have asked why the ConfedExpo is going ahead at all in a week when the NHS is once again troubled by doctors’ strikes. This is a bit like asking why a brigade of cub scouts is being allowed to go on a field trip when there’s a war raging in eastern Europe.

So, NHS managers are gathering in Manchester for some enthusiastic networking and extra-marital sex. Let them have their fun. What harm can they possibly do?

Building on success

The organisers sound as pleasantly surprised as we are that the event is back for another year.

The blurb on the NHS Confed website reads: “After the success of NHS ConfedExpo 2022, NHS Confederation and NHS England are pleased to announce NHS ConfedExpo will return in 2023.”

It’s that wonderfully familiar health policy riff: the next thing perpetually built on the “success” of the last. Best not to ask too many searching questions.

There is a charming and long-running fiction that NHS conferences are places where things get done. This myth is immediately dispelled by the agenda.

There are “keynotes” by Amanda Pritchard, the hapless and frequently confused opposition health and care shadow minister Wes Streeting and the aforementioned Squire Barclay, who will make a brief appearance on the second day.

The squire will politely acknowledge the chair’s demands for clarity but will, of course, fail to provide any. He will then scuttle back to his estate to continue worming the deer and closing the footpaths to ramblers.

Towards the integration zone

The Expo element of the Confed shindig refers grandiosely to the shanty town of stands and booths adjacent to the main auditorium. These house the usual collection of NHS hangers-on, charities, software companies, professional bodies, private health providers, pharma companies, and organisations dabbling in “improvement” witchcraft (as well as, of course, HSJ’s own bijou presence).

At the centre of the hall, the largest stands are occupied by our hosts NHSE and NHS Confederation. If you’re at a loose end, dropping into either stand and asking the staff what they actually do can be an amusing way to spend a few minutes.

The exhibition is laid out in zones – or what we used to call siloes. There is an innovation zone, a social care zone (this year with a tumbleweed and foodbanks theme), a transformation zone and something called a system collaboration feature zone.

When next year’s event builds on the success of this one, expect to see new zones devoted to integration and irony.

Amazing people

But let’s not waste time picking up leaflets and popping breath mints, there’s a packed agenda to enjoy. There are people here from the telly giving motivational talks and highlighting important social issues. There’s a famous CBeebies presenter with an even more famous NHS dad. Everything to appeal to the NHS manager demographic has been catered for.

The NHS’s 75^th birthday gets its own zone, where there are numerous NHS 75-themed sessions making moving if tenuous connections between the health service’s anniversary, the Windrush generation, international best practice, social justice and name badges.

There is the inevitable NHS birthday celebration of “the people who make it what it is” featuring stories about “amazing staff who do amazing things” told by amazing leaders.

Chris Hopson: this is me!

Delegates also have the opportunity – or duty – to “explore the history of Britain’s beloved institution”. Your guides are a pair of academics and Chris Hopson, himself a beloved institution. As NHSE’s head of strategy and communications, there’s not much Chris doesn’t know about history and the importance of rewriting it.

This is Mr Hopson’s second outing of the day. In the morning during an “In conversation with…” session he was due to “reflect on his first year in the role and the progress made across England”. This is the problem with agendas written months in advance.

There were chances to catch up with other celebrities in conversation such as Mark Fisher, chief executive of NHS Greater Manchester, the centre of the unravelling devolution experiment. Mr Fisher was also planning to talk about progress. That problem with long-range agendas again.

Even the “In conversation” sessions have their own dedicated zone. No one could accuse the organisers of doing things by halves.

We could be heroes

By the time you read this, it will probably be all over.

The delegates will have returned home replete with insights, all of them deep and many of them “inspirational”. They will share them on social media. There will be warm expressions of gratitude and humility, a renewed appetite for “challenge” and frequent references to heroes.

Stay off Twitter for a few days if any of this is triggering.

The returnees will be greeted by the familiar welcoming sights of their crumbling hospitals, their growing waiting lists, their ballooning deficits and their striking clinicians.

But they will be borne aloft by the memory of Manchester shimmering in the summer sunshine. To the casual observer, an overheated conference centre filled with sweaty managers. To a leader, a cathedral of clarity.