I’d be very surprised if the NHS’ “new models of care” were built to last

I’d be very surprised if anyone expects the “new models of care” from NHS England, regularly showcased at conferences, will be the final answer on the organisation of the NHS and social care. Changes in system organisation for dementia are very unsettling, particularly when they happen so regularly.

But the contrast between the “global response” to dementia and the global response to “climate” couldn’t be starker. The former was spearheaded as a response by Big Pharma, undercover of the G7, to ‘find a cure by 2025′, where clearly the main beneficiaries were corporate stakeholders, not the current 47 million people living around the world with dementia.

The film “Still Alice” is testament to this. It pictures one end of dementia services, the medicalisation of dementia, where the patient is privy to a sophisticated expensive brain scan and a specific genetic diagnosis and management plan. Whether or not it is ‘Hollywood’, or indeed the conflation of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (“Alzheimerisation”), it is far cry to how dementia is actually identified and acted upon in low income in countries. But climate change affects everyone – including China, which for the purposes of the climate discussion, is a “developing country”, not a powerful growing economy. I say the response to dementia could have been one which also benefits everyone – there are after all many people living with dementia around the world.

But China also happens to make iPads, whatever your particular views of globalisation. In the long view of any corporate producing products, the strategy factors in the fact that a product will be regularly updated every years to maintain growth in the industry. I dare say when Apple was envisaging the iPad, it may already have known about the iPad2, but not necessarily about the iPad Pro.

I’d be very surprised if the NHS and social care, and all who benefit from advising it, view the “new models of care” as their final answer. It doesn’t as such matter, as is usual in higher NHS management culture, if they screw up.

“Planned obsolescence” or “built-in obsolescence” in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time. The rationale behind the strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases.

In the United States, automotive design had appeared to reach a turning point in 1924 when the American national automobile market began reaching saturation. According to the ‘Ansoff curve’, known to every keen student of management, diversification is the only option.

To maintain unit sales, General Motors head Alfred P. Sloan Jr. suggested annual model-year design changes to convince car owners that they needed to buy a new replacement each year, an idea borrowed from the bicycle industry, though the concept is often misattributed to Sloan.

And this principle still continues up until today.

Tech repair and upgrade website “iFixit” has claimed that the Apple Watch won’t be a long term option for those hoping to continually upgrade their device. Upon the release of the Apple Watch, “iFixit” immediately got down to the business of (iBuffs look away now) tearing the brand new product open and evaluating it from the inside. According to “iFixIt”, The s1SiP is custom-designed Apple technology that integrates a number of subsystems like the chip into one package. It is, in fact, encased in resin to increase its durability.

apple watches

It is not uncommon now for gadgets to have every component soldered onto a massive circuit board so that individual replacements are impossible.

At the beginning of April 2015, the National Institute for Health Research published the final version of the report, Insights from the clinical assurance of reconfiguration in the NHS, written by The King’s Fund. They found that those considering reconfiguration often have a limited evidence base to draw on and that few reconfigurations achieved the financial savings they promised. And I dare say many of them fail to achieve their exact clinical outcomes.

The tragedy is, of course, that we have been here very many times before.

The Conservatives won the election in June 1970, and Sir Keith Joseph replaced Richard Crossman. Joseph produced his own proposals for NHS reorganisation that were embodied in a White Paper published in August 1972.

As in Crossman’s plan, local health authority areas were to be matched with local government boundaries. Hospitals, nursing services, health centres and general practitioners were brought under the control of the new local authorities. These measures were incorporated in the National Health Service Reorganisation Act of July 1973.

NHS England has religiously avoided use of the term “pilot” in relation to its new models of care programme, preferring vanguard, “early adopters” and “first cohort”. With bidders having been told they must have “a credible plan to move at serious pace to make rapid change in 2015”, the intent seems clear. But will these pilots which are not pilots work?

According to the “The NHS – a manager’s tale” published by the Nuffield Hospitals Provincial Trust,

“Barbara Castle took over from Keith Joseph as Secretary of State for Social Services with David Owen as her number two. They decided it was too late to stop or radically change the re-organisation due on 1st April but they displayed little enthusiasm for it. Thus the changes were launched with luke-warm political support.”

And even then the influence of McKinsey’s had been felt:

“A large multi-disciplinary steering group had been created and chaired by the then Permanent Secretary, Sir Philip Rogers. The group was supported in its work by the Management Consultants McKinsey and Co Incorporated and the Health Services Organisational Research Unit of Brunel University led by Professor Jaques. Their report, Management Arrangements for the Re-organised NHS, which was published in 1972, came to be known as The Grey Book (the colour of its cover).”

Fast forward 30 years, and, in 2012, it was reported that 

“A Mail on Sunday investigation, based on hundreds of official documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, has revealed the full extent of McKinsey’s myriad links to the controversial reforms.

Many of the Bill’s proposals were drawn up by McKinsey and included in the legislation wholesale.”

I am superficially interested in the ‘new models of care’ as they apply to my speciality, dementia, but I would extremely surprised if they were built to last. Therein lies the exhaustion of the ‘planned obsolescence’ of policy in dementia.