Loop2 have written a report from a workshop event held on the 14th March in Leeds on the leadership needs of the allied health professions.

The idea behind this exploratory event was to allow a small group of key players from the world of AHPs to step back from their day to day concerns and spend some focussed time and energy on the future. We drew on the wide range of experience and judgement in the room to map out the environment in which AHPs will be operating in the future, to consider what direction the professions should be taking and to think about how we get the right leadership for the journey. The programme was highly participative, was certainly good fun and hopefully will be influential in the way we both find and develop AHP leaders in the future.

You can download the report here.

In June 2008 the Kings’ Fund published the report of the SeeSaw simulation that Loop2 designed for the Department of Health. Our starting point for this project was the observation that despite a consistent theme in government policy to encourage more care to be provided in community settings, outside major hospitals, the extent of the shift is patchy and in some cases disappointingly slow. SeeSaw aimed to explore what would need to happen to accelerate shifts in the pattern of healthcare and whether new levers and incentives were needed. Published before Lord Darzis’ report we were pleased to see a number of the SeeSaw issues and recommendations have already been picked up. To download a free copy of the report click here for a link to the King’s Fund website.

We continue to be amazed at the public’s interest in and willingness to learn about quite complex concepts in health care planning and decision making. We have taken our deliberative processes a giant step forward by designing a ‘game’ to help the public and patients understand the complex world of health care commissioning. It went down a storm with participants many of whom claimed it was the best public meeting they had ever attended and of course with the PCT brave enough to let us do it. The game helps participants experience real life decisions with the complex trade offs between value sets, evidence, political must do’s, public preferences and interest group lobbying to name a few. More than this the decisions that participants make offer real insights into the priorities they want their commissioners to make in the real world. And through discussion with other members of the public a good few had mindsets challenged if not changed. The game can be easily run in any location but equally can be customised to local issues and dillemmas.

As well as supporting local public engagement as part of the Next Stage Review we have also supported numerous Trusts and PCTs on major reconfiguration of health services. Sometimes we are called in to help with the design of the consultation itself but we also provide support to the design of the the front end and implementation aspects of service change. Prior to formal consultations we design deliberative processes to engage patients and the public in understanding pressures for change and in contributing their ideas about principles and future priorities – all of which is important in informing the definition of future options. Read more »

The future state of the NHS and its ability to cope with the introduction of a more market system is still a controversial topic for many inside the NHS as well as patients and the public. The scale of the current changes is immense and yet many managers and clinicians have commented that there is no ‘big picture’ of how the changes will fit together. It was this observation that led to the Windmill 2007 project. Read more »

The best way of describing how these work that we have come across is the mirror analogy outlined by Michael Schrage in his book Serious Play: How the world’s best companies simulate to innovate. The mirror is a hypothetical one but imagine how it works. This full length mirror has the power to instantly modify how you look in response to voice commands. You can see how you would look if you lost or gained a few pounds or had an extra session in the gym each week. You could ask it to show you the best and worst case pictures of how you will age or explore what different outfits would look like. What would you ask that mirror and how would its images change how you behave as the real you. Read more »