I love a plan

You might want to stop reading my blog for a while (please don’t!).  I am definitely in danger of boring you to tears with banging on about the Diabetes Aide Memoire.  I have one in my bag at all times. It’s because I’m excited about it.  

Personally I love a plan. 

I might be alone -  but for me, the last 3 years, since April 2013, have been “The Wilderness Years”.  There has been a sense of anarchy, tearing up the rule book.  It has felt like the NHS has become a frontier town.  Yes, there has been a sense of excitement, mania, creativity.  But also a sense of lawlessness and chaos. 

In April 2013, we were told it was all about local ownership, local decisions.  Decide your priorities based on local intelligence and in consultation with local people.  We had a pick list of things that CCGs could look at called the CCG Outcomes Indicator Set to help choose priorities and track improvement.  Local things for local people.  It was a good philosophy and one that must never be lost. 

However, I found it difficult to work out:

1)      Who was focused on what?

2)      The rationale for selection?

3)      How to galvanise across boundary approach when we are all doing different things?

It was difficult to understand whether things were improving.  I’d be at meetings hearing some good shared practice but be thinking, that’s nice but that’s not what we are working on locally.

It was difficult to get the collective transformational push at “pace and scale” that the national rhetoric is increasingly shouting about.

So I love the STP “Diabetes Aide Memoire”.  It is one of the 6 “Aides” for the 6 clinical areas of focus in the CCG Improvement and Assessment Framework.  The 6 clinical areas were picked as the areas that could provide the most impactful, transformational change.

It’s only 2 pages long. Love it.

It’s not to replace locally identified needs and locally developed solutions.  Please don’t let that be the unintended consequence but it does provide some areas where we can have a collective approach, across boundaries and push together.

So this week I want to set you all a little task.  Share the Diabetes Aide Memoire widely.  Keep one in your bag.  Whip it out and quote at meetings. Hand out copies to your next Network, Board, PLT, etc meetings and ask how the objectives are going to be tackled.  Get some ideas.