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Friday
Feb082013

Mr Francis - too late, too little?

There's loads in the Francis report. 290 recommendations to be exact.
The report is critical but from a medical perspective it looks like a list of symptoms rather than a definitive diagnosis.
Occam's razor suggests that multiple answers to a problem are probably wrong, event root cause analysis gets down to the first thing that went wrong eventually. In the case of Francis it's still not diagnostic.
Neither is it really therapeutic either.
The recommendations are all worthy, sensible and predictable.
However the fundamental failure is not named clearly.
Drucker said "management is doing things right - leadership is doing the right things".
Francis names the management failures, there are loads, and in part the leadership failures, but for me misses the critical point.
Everyone in mid Staffs ceased caring.
The leadership challenge we face is how to introduce "discrete love" into our cynical safeguarded world. How to allow staff to care for patients like family, with compassion and empathy.
Sadly that's one element of care that can not be managed and must be lead. Leadership in the style of Shackleton and not Nicholson is what we require in the NHS.

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