Chop Chop

I’m not sure what it looks like from the outside in in Localised HealthCare right now. And I’ve been reticent to talk about what it feels like from the inside. It is still a little bit too much of a hot potato in some ways.

What I think might be useful though is to set out what the environment is like in Leeds from the birds eye perspective I have here at Information for Mental Health. It is of course, my birds eye perspective though and I’m not sure I’m party to all the facts. But its a fuzzy enough overview to give something of a picture.

There have been sweeping Health cuts – they hit the Voluntary Sector first and the much deeper evidence of how they are and will continue to effect the Primary Care Trust themselves is still being revealed. Now we’re on the cusp of the Social Care cuts.

its a little strange that I find we are talking about Health cuts and Social Care cuts. Not re-organisation or re-configuring. I’m not sure if I’ve become so subsumed by it myself or if this is the language that everyone within HealthCare is talking.

And its not that I am in denial about the need for cuts or saving money. My issue is that the focus has gone straight there. And with that, all anyone can see or hear or feel is this terrible sense of chop, chop, chop. Now I have an almost unconscious image of a Commissioner with a big set of pruning shears sat somewhere waiting for me to show my branch and leaves.

I’ve put forward to Leeds Mental Health Commissioners my vision for how Mental Health information should be delivered in Leeds. My view is for an effective networked technical integration and a strategic development plan factoring in the digital technology and social media field. This would save money in the first instance and then would go on to provide a firm basis for building social capital, engagement and setting some kind of standardisation for telehealth and mobile health to plug into in the near future. But it doesn’t actually involve any cuts.

And that is a scary thing to do, because there is a general sense, an unspoken sense that if you put yourself in full view. CHOP.

I’m not sure that this is a correct view. In fact I think more of the Commissioners I know than that, and rationality tells me this is not any kind of solution that anyone will make. My primal fears however, prick a little and I’m tireder and find it much more energy consuming to keep those fears at bay to do the good, clear thinking we need in HealthCare right now.

I’ve made a few inferences from this about what will be happening Nationally – I think that fear and its draining nature its and will continue to take its toll. The more that focus can be put in a way that helps HealthCare to think about future flourishing and how best to prepare for that in the current climate, the better. The more it can be taken from thinking simply ‘cut, cut, cut’, the better.
Personally, I’d like to hear everyone getting more real, constructively.