The sector promotes women and safety
Supporting women in private healthcare and encouraging their career development is vital, says Independent Healthcare Providers Network boss David Hare.
For last month’s annual International Women’s Day, especially within healthcare, it was incredibly important for us to celebrate the importance of women in our industry.
At the same time, we also recognised they are disproportionately under-represented in leadership positions.
According to the World Health Organization, women account for 70% of the global healthcare sector and yet, at the executive level, women make up just 25% of healthcare leadership positions.
So I believe it is incumbent on all of us to enable and support the women in our workplaces, who make up the bulk of the workforce of our industry.
As part of International Woman’s Day, we platformed members of our Women Leaders in Independent Healthcare Network on our social media channels. They shared their experiences, perspectives, advice and things they would like to see improve.
We were pleased to see the positive reaction within the healthcare community to what they said, and the discourse it generated.
As part of the ongoing work of our Women Leaders in Independent Healthcare Network, we are holding a networking breakfast in late April.
Danielle Henry
There we will be having Helen Buckingham, director of strategy at the Nuffield Trust, and Alex Ryan, Acacium’s Group service development director, speak to attendees about their careers and what they have learned.
We were also extremely proud to see Danielle Henry, IHPN’s assistant director of policy and programmes, named to the Trade Association Forum’s Women in Trade Association (WiTA) Powerlist.
This is the second iteration of the WiTA powerlist, which was created to champion the role of women in trade associations, celebrate their achievements and encourage the next generation of women into the association sector.
Showing off the sector’s safety forte
We are only a few months into the year, but it already feels like so much has happened already and there’s plenty more on the horizon.
My Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN) colleagues have been getting out and about in the past month.
They travelled to Liverpool for the opening of InHealth’s new community diagnostic centre (CDC) and also saw its patient referral centre in Rochdale and Alliance Medical’s CDC in Oldham.
These developments are great examples of how the independent sector can work very powerfully, especially in partnership with the NHS.
Our director of regulation, Dawn Hodgkins, hosted Prof Ted Baker and Rosie Benneyworth, the chair and interim chief executive of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB), to a day in London where they visited a number of our members.
They were able to see HCA Primary Care at the Shard, Bupa’s Cromwell Hospital, InHealth’s CDC in Fitzrovia and Nuffield Health at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
All this was to help the HSSIB develop a better overview of systems risks, to highlight some of the innovative and fantastic work being done and gain a clearer understanding of the private healthcare landscape.
These visits come ahead of our annual patient safety conference in central London on 15 May where Rosie will be presenting along with Care Quality Commission (CQC) chief executive Ian Trenholm and the patient safety commissioner for England Dr Henrietta Hughes.
The conference has a focus this year on Culture of Caring: Listening, Leading and Learning.
It is a fantastic opportunity for senior clinical leaders, clinical governance leads and patient safety specialists to come together and learn more about how to create a culture of caring that supports safe care.
Big demand for private healthcare
We can already see the impacts that NHS waiting lists are having on the British people, through the release of PHIN’s quarterly data update.
The report shows strong continued demand for private healthcare, with large numbers of patients choosing to use the private sector to access healthcare.
It is also notable to see the numbers of insurance-based admissions are still high, which insurers have also been reporting – with corporate insurance demand still strong.
There has been lots of discussion about the cost of inactivity to the economy, and we know that NHS waiting times are not only impacting people, but business is also concerned about the impact of these long delays on staff absence rates and productivity.
Our most recent research showed that a quarter of businesses are already offering private medical insurance to employees, and one in five are planning to introduce it within the next year, so businesses are being proactive in ensuring the well-being of their workforce.
We know from the research conducted in our Industry Barometer report that our members feel confident about the private care market, with 88% of them feeling positive or very positive about private medical insurance-funded services, and 86% feeling positive or very positive about domestic self-pay services.
This, coupled with NHS waiting lists being such a driver of people choosing to go private, makes us think that the trend of increased demand for private healthcare looks set to continue strongly.
MPAF is adopted in Wales
We were delighted to be able to announce recently that, after nearly a year working closely with Welsh Government and Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW), the Medical Practitioners Assurance Framework (MPAF) now has a letter of support from Welsh Government and Healthcare Inspectorate Wales.
This highlights that the use of the MPAF Wales will be seen as evidence of best practice during HIW inspections.
Obviously, this is very positive news for colleagues working in Wales, who admittedly are small in number.
But the wider point is that it is a further demonstration that the MPAF is still very much a yardstick and standard which is just as important and relevant today as it was when Sir Bruce Keogh launched it in October 2019 and when it was refreshed in 2022.
The MPAF contains key principles to strengthen and build upon the medical governance systems already in place in the sector and sets out expected practice in key areas.
In England, the CQC uses the framework’s principles in assessing how well led an independent service is, with the framework a requirement of the NHS’s 2022-23 Standard Contract which all independent sector providers of NHS-funded care must adhere to.
There is no question that as private healthcare continues to grow, so too will the expectations of patients and the scrutiny of the media and other stakeholders – all of which means that good clinical and medical governance will be under the spotlight like never before.