Communicating within the GP Consortia – how to engage all?

Speaking to the Royal College of GPs last Friday, Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley delivered a confidence shattering blow to the poor Department of Health communications person who wrote the national letter on patient records:

“We all received a letter through the door on patient records saying we could opt out if we wanted to, but the letter was so long and poorly written that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who struggled to understand what it was saying!”

Ouch. However, having re-written the DoH standard issue press release into sentences that didn’t cause you pass-out for lack of breath mid-sentence, I catch his drift.

Too many cooks is often the problem. Every department has a an issue or a point that they believe is business critical to include. The end result being a bamboozled patient and a complete lack of engagement from the public due to government ‘health speak’.

I’ve worked across a wide range of public sector organisations, each with their own industry specific techno-babble, but none so ingrained, ambiguous and counter-intuitive as that I’ve witnessed in the health sector. It’s contagious and people go-native quickly. But with such a public facing role where techno-babble gets a short shrift response of ‘What?’ from the patient’s chair, avoiding the pitfalls of management jargon and too many cooks is something I’m ambitious that the new GP commissioning arrangements will be able to do.

In an excellent recent Healthcare Republic article by Mr Mo Girach, special adviser on social enterprise and co-operatives to the NHS Alliance, the key points for GPs to consider to ensure they communicate clearly with their patients are outlined. Real patient engagement will be key to realising the ambitions of Lansley’s reforms.

The current LiNKs and PALs programmes are far from this. Speaking at the Labour Party Conference Health Hotel debate a few weeks ago, Dr Foster’s Tim Kelsey said: “It’s a travesty that LiNKs amounts to our current level of patient engagement”.

Gathering the views of the opinionated and time rich few, these patient engagement programs are valuable to some extent but are far from representative of general public opinion.

Patient-led commissioning will have to be simple. In fact, it can’t even be called patient led commissioning because that’s more techno-babble. There is no easy alternate word for commissioning, I’ve searched long and hard – comments please if you disagree! Instead, I believe GPs need to talk less about ‘commissioning’ and more about ‘patient purchasing power’ or ‘patients’ right to buy’ – language that the public, as consumers of services, are used to seeing elsewhere.

Lansley’s pledge, in this same speech, to “hand power” to patients and their carers by enabling them to spend their own budget will continue the ‘Our health, our care, our say‘ of the Labour years- putting care brokerage back on top of the agenda.

This will bring purchasing power back to the patient in the most real way possible. Under these arrangements, GPs will have a very real duty of care to communicate clearly with their  care and health budget holders, to ensure that patients of all languages, literacy, ability and knowledge will be able to navigate the services available to them.