I had the pleasure of listening to Ms Maureen Bisognano (President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement) at the international forum on Quality and Safety in Paris. Her speech centred around improving health care by flipping our thinking in order to develop new models of care which in turn will improve the way we deliver healthcare and lower costs, the latter being a very important issue in our NHS.
The inspiration behind “flipping” healthcare came about from the classroom. The concept suggests that instead of the conventional model of learning via lectures and instructions in the classroom and homework, this model is instead “flipped” so that lectures are available as videos to students watched outside of the classroom. And class time is spent on what was learnt from the material given at home, helping teachers to identify the students learning needs and help those who are failing to grasp the concept of what they are learning. This model has shown tremendous results, Ms Biognanos recent article in the BMJ, has suggested that a Detroit high school graduation rates rose to 90% while graduates attending college rose from 63% to 80%.
So can we flip the NHS?
The concept here is that we as clinicians should put the person and not the disease in improving healthcare, in other words flipping the equilibrium of care from secondary care to primary care. Hospital care will of course always be crucial, but currently the resources within the NHS are unsustainable. Engaging the community on the importance of good health is crucial to the flipped model, this includes schools, places of worship as well as charitable organisations.
As a trainee in General Practice this thinking fascinated me. From a general practice point of view, is it possible to use innovative technology to communicate/manage our patients? Can we work closely with our community allies as well as our Allied health professionals?
The flipped healthcare model has shown to work in the USA and Netherlands, briefly described in the BMJ article. As Doctors in the NHS we should be more open to change and I believe that it is this barrier that is preventing us from moving to a new way of thinking.
