Page 1 2 3 4

Transformation at ground level. A few key healthcare providers in the NHS system, like South Essex Partnership Trust (SEPT), are proceeding rapidly with their own local transformational process. A look at their website: http://www.southessex-trust.nhs.uk/ gives you a window into how SEPT is reaching out to its community, transforming its workforce, and enhancing clinical services while reaching financial targets. Under the initiative of its dynamic Chief Executive, Patrick Geoghegan, SEPT has undertaken another initiative. SEPT has chosen to play a leadership role for the whole system by helping other NHS organizations learn from outside perspectives as well as its own growing pains. If you look closely at the website, under ‘Training’, you will see that SEPT offers a host of professional development opportunities to its NHS colleagues, including a few programs focused on leadership, management, and organizational development.

New relationships. The NHS of the 21st Century requires its clinicians, leaders and workforce to redesign where and how healthcare is provided to achieve the reform’s stated goals. They must also develop new leadership and management capabilities that can support new structures. Learning to work collaboratively in order to create a patient-focused delivery system requires new skills. From our perspective, a recent Cain Brothers monograph in their ‘Strategies in Capital Finance’ series (August, 2007) offers valuable insight into how to undertake alternative types of partnerships between hospitals and physicians. Go to the website to find a list of the monographs and newsletters: http://cainbrothers.com/research/login.cfm If you want to keep pace with current strategic and healthcare financing issues, you may want to sign up for their various web-based resources. Their thoughtful and reliable information certainly keeps the Callaway Group current. 

The Callaway Group contribution. The value we bring to our UK and USA clients are our tools of delivery system redesign, strategic partnerships and company revitalization. Our services incorporate many lessons we’ve learned as senior executives in some of the USA’s most advanced and innovative integrated delivery systems and in our role as senior advisors to many other healthcare organizations. We also rely on a strong network of collaborating partners with specialized knowledge in large-scale implementation (the people side of change), healthcare financing for new ventures and capital projects, multi-specialty group practices, and clinical coordination of care. This is our commitment to collaboration as a way of doing business.

In 2008, the Callaway Group has augmented its client offerings to include leadership capacity building through tailored in-house leadership development programs and individual development plans for senior team members. Both will soon be supported by e-learning platforms.

Challenges for Developing Countries

Resource scarcity. The pervasive theme of healthcare delivery in developing countries is scarcity of all essential resources. Even without epidemics such as HIV/AIDs and malaria that can decimate entire populations, every developing country struggles to provide even the most basic healthcare to its people. In spite of or, in part, because of the billions of dollars pouring into many developing countries since 2000 for the treatment of isolated diseases, basic healthcare services continue to deteriorate across the board.

Already fragile infrastructures are crumbling. Hospitals often built more than eighty years ago routinely go without water or electricity for days due to chronic community-wide water and power shortages. Donated equipment sits unused and broken because donors often forget there are few trained biomedical technicians to keep even basic machines working. Critical supplies languish on docks or in warehouses because simple inventory and accounting management processes do not exist. Although willing, very few clinical professionals have the management and leadership knowledge to change the present situation.

In the desire to lend a hand, outsiders unfamiliar with real conditions on the ground inadvertently can make matters worse. To gain insight about this sobering reality on the ground, we refer you to two excellent research papers. The first one, The Challenge of Global Health was published in Foreign Affairs in 2007 and authored by Research Fellow, Laurie Garrett. It presents compelling evidence about the dire state of healthcare delivery systems in most developing countries, especially in Africa. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070101faessay86103/laurie-garrett/the-challenge-of-global-health.html

A mounting human resource crisis. The 21st Century begins with global healthcare manpower crisis. Nowhere is this felt more seriously than in developing countries. A second research paper, The Health Sector, Human Resource Crisis in Africa: An Issues Paper, was prepared in 2003 by three organizations, including USAID, to summarize the situation in Africa. Issues described in this monograph are mirrored on any continent where developing countries dominate the economic landscape.
http://www.healthgap.org/camp/hcw_docs/USAID_healthsector_africa.pdf

Accessing essential healthcare resources. From our on-the-ground perspective, getting access to essential resources remains a daunting challenge for those leaders sincerely trying to improve the health of their population. Most days courageous women and men with the enormous responsibility of improving healthcare in their respective countries spend their time and energy finding funds to pay for: relevant clinical and managerial know how; renovate or build minimally acceptable healthcare facilities; purchase adequate clinical supplies and equipment; and, perhaps most importantly, pay healthcare workers to provide essential healthcare.

The brain drain continues, in spite of serious efforts by many developing country governments to train more healthcare workers at all levels. As mentioned in the previous section, the scramble for clinically trained personnel in the developed countries is having a crippling effect on developing countries. The example of one country will highlight the magnitude of the problem.

Page 1 2 3 4

US News and World Report Cover Story: "Medical Tourism" (www.usnews.com)

CG Insights Archive

CG Insights Volume 1