Recast: The NHS Future Forum's four workstreams

This week's Health Service Journal HSJ is in my laptop bag.

In last weeks issue (25 August 2011) was an editorial mention
and news item (p. 6-7) on the NHS Future Forum's four workstreams.

 Apparently, the new addition on a further round of consultation is integration. It may be new for this government and in this context, but the issue of integration has been on the policy table before. 

I've set the four workstreams within Hodges' model:

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

Education and training	Public (mental) health
Integration	Information

There is a lot of overlap, perhaps that is why integration proves so problematic? Yes, integration is SO political; there are budgets, management, teams, leadership... but it's SOCIAL! Professionals are socialised - trained into practice. Maybe that is the place to start - a mash-up?

Education and training are with the individual - the self. The same issue reports the "shocking" finding of staff who have had no professional development through their careers. Staff must be sufficiently motivated, engaged to seek professional development themselves.

Public health is social too, especially when it comes to non-academic transmission. Public health though relies on evidence - science, but let's not forget the inclusion of that mental component.

Information: so many people await the new information strategy. Despite decades of focus on information, information technology, the benefits of information for clinicians, commissioning there is still so much to learn and get right.

It isn't that the three domains of SCIENCES (medicine, nursing), INTERPERSONAL (mental health, learning disability) and SOCIOLOGY (social care, social work) seek to surround and confound the POLITICAL (managers, policy makers). The ongoing challenges highlight the sheer complexity of it all. It also illustrates the immaturity of our knowledge and lack of understanding of this stuff that is information. This next week I am looking forward not only to giving a brief presentation on h2cm and engaging with information, but listening to a very varied interdisciplinary programme:

The Difference that Makes a Difference:
an interdisciplinary workshop on information and technology
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

If the strategy groups need a tool to help them find and integrate answers to the big questions might I suggest they adopt a suitably scalable framework.

Additional links:
NHS Future Forum recommendations to Government
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/mental-health-is-a-global-urgent-issue/signatures.html