Barnardos’ Director of Health Rukshana Kapasi has called for a big shift to integrated care to tackle significant health inequalities and a crisis for children.
Delivering the Nick Robin Memorial Lecture as the keynote speaker, Rukshana explained why change was essential. A carer of a child with a life-limiting condition, and a former nurse, she shared her concerns that Victorian diseases were returning to the UK 158 years after the charity Barnardos was founded.
She told delegates: ‘You are one of the most important workforces in the NHS. How amazingly resilient HVs and SNs are as a child health workforce. But we need to be prepared to break out of our silos and organisational working and work with humility and generosity beyond the NHS. We need to be working differently, articulating what we want to change and developing relationships of trust. Pick the right partnerships where our values align. Nurture our partnership entrepreneurial qualities. We need a solution-focused mindset with sharp foresight. Think like a system and act like an entrepreneur – always put the child at the centre.’
Rukshana highlighted several Barnardos initiatives where collaboration and partnership had been successful. A good example was the Birmingham Forward Steps – A Healthy Child Partnership, which was set up in 2018 to create one single health system. One contract was built to replace 75 that existed before. The change led to greater efficiency and increased uptake of health checks in just 12 months.
Trust is an essential ingredient to partnership working, but Rukshana asked why it remains so elusive and difficult to achieve. An individual may have trust in a person, but that does not mean they trust an organisation, she said.
All of the models she highlighted showed the NHS working across traditional boundaries but with collaboration at the heart of them. She reminded delegates of Darwin’s words: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.’
Image | Unite-CPHVA
