Item in the new: “The manufacturer of a drug which could extend the lives of thousands of people suffering from a rare form of cancer has agreed to pay for further patient treatment as part of a cost-cutting scheme.”  This arises from a decision of the English agency NICE to recommend limited use of this medicine.

We have a situation where the pharma company is going to provide the medicine for free to a certain group of patients (the details aren’t important for this commentary) at a certain point in their treatment — in this case toward the end of that person’s life.

How are we to make sense of this?

Who benefits?: the patients get the medicine which they would otherwise not get it toward the end of their life; indeed, unless they were able to pay for it themselves, they would be deprived of the medicine. NHS gets a medicine, which it would otherwise not pay for, for free, for a group of patients, one might argue they were abandoning.

Who pays?: the pharma company absorbs the cost of doing this for one final application of the medicine if needed; the public sector does not pay anything.

When some derive benefit for free from the actions of others, we call the former free riders; that makes the NHS a free-rider. Indeed, one might view NICE and other HTA agencies as acting to achieve free-ridership for the public system, by rationing public funding according to the HTA assessments. The pharma companies, wanting their medicines to be used (they might actually also want them to be paid for), give them away for this group of patients for their own reasons.

This small group of patients would undoubtedly suffer, a price NICE deems worth the cost, and the NHS in this case, is willing to be bound by a decision which may actually increase suffering. The pharma company has come to the rescue of these few patients and is now doing what one would think the public system should do, alleviate suffering. Had the pharma company put profits before use (which they appear not to be doing otherwise they would have sought payment) no doubt they would have been criticised for their prices, which of course underpins NICE’s cost-benefit analysis in part.

Did NICE shake down the pharma company?

I have argued elsewhere, that public health systems must be the payer of last resort (the so-called Rule of Rescue), which should challenge NICE’s models that would increase suffering, as that cost is something no state should ignore. The unethical conduct of public bodies here is breathtaking.

The whatever they are called talks in Copenhagen on climate demonstrate the broken nature of our approach to achieving consensus amongst a diversity of nations, views, and wishes. The circus will soon close and we may have very little to show for it, despite everyone’s hopes and wishes. A room with THAT many people in it could hardly agree what to put on a pizza, let alone work through a complex drafting of such an important document.

A few points are worth noting:

1. Trying to achieve an agreement by having the negotiations stretch throughout the night, so no one gets any sleep is bull-headed, and is hardly evidence of clear and coherent thoughts at 3 in the morning.  Early morning tweets from politicians who have stayed up all night just adds to the impression that these people don’t know what they are doing.
2. The notion that the backroom gang do all the heavy lifting and then the leaders swan in to sign the final draft is well-past its sell-by date. Clearly, neither works.

Savvy negotiators know that getting your opponent to go without sleep is one way to ensure both delay and achievement of your objectives. Tiredness doesn’t just kill on the road, but is a well-established brinkmanship tactic. It is particularly helpful when there is a hard deadline, and great expectations of results; the closer to the deadline with a lack of agreement, the more likely sleep will be deprived and decision-making and clear-thinking begin to fail. Better to add days than nights to negotiations, and drop this adolescent behaviour.

Setting expectations high also creates an opportunity for nay-sayers to bargain their way to a lower level of agreement, giving the impression of failure whereas they may actually have found the spot at which agreement is most likely, but having failed to establish a Plan B, meant that it was Plan A or failure. An existence of a Plan B, though, would have infuriated some advocates for agreement, as it would identify prima facie where compromise would be likely.  The problem in part was that compromise is often seen as failure, rather than agreement by other means. Perhaps it is better to under-promise and over-deliver.

The use of backroom staff is important, but it is evident from Copenhagen that a lot of fundamental bluesky disagreements remained and where solutions lay above the pay grades of the staff involved.  Better than leaders learn to do their own work, and have the backroom staff refine the language, than the other way round.

The problem with Copenhagen appears to be faltering over accountability; this is a re-run of the nuclear arms treaties. One could argue that objections may be well-founded, but we haven’t seen the basis for that. Agreements do need mechanisms to ensure they do what they are intended to do, but we don’t have sufficient vocabulary for what we need as in the past, most agreements were either treaties with broadly equal partners (e.g. Treaty of Rome) or were imposed by victors over vanquished (take your pick here). This seems more like a communitarian process, with considerable inequality. Perhaps some lessons from community development models would have been helpful.

Of course, this is all quite apart from whether a deal is pulled out of the hat, and whether it is a deal or just a political fix.

Who owns a profession and who should take responsibility for its development?

In the UK, the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery has been working away for awhile to determine the future of these two professions, so lets reflect on this question and look at what this Commission appears to be thinking.

The most obvious observation is that it appears to be thinking of nursing and midwifery within an NHS context. Many nurses work outside of the state-sponsored NHS, such in prisons, nursing homes, private and independent settings and workplaces. The Commission’s focus, therefore, on defining the future role of the profession suffers from a dilemma and in resolving this dilemma in a particular way, may further limit these professions to what the NHS defines as its role. This is particularly worrisome given the dire need for fresh and innovative thinking particularly from such a broad and diverse profession as nurses and midwifes which may indeed need to challenge current political and policy thinking.

I wonder whether, too, it is indeed appropriate for the ‘state’ to sponsor this type of work in the first place. The selection of those on the Commission is probably subject to various criteria — one can only hope that these folk are able to address the work of these professions in non-NHS settings in the first place, and secondly can address the dire need for fresh thinking about future demands and innovative approaches to service delivery, however and wherever.

The other concern is the tendency of these sorts of activities to become a restatement of warm words of praise, and in the end fail to move beyond that to address the underlying interconnectedness of clinical work, the interprofessional relationships and clinical responsibility and indeed to more disruptive and potentially more professionally satisfying professional development itself. Regretfully, the so-called “summary vision” is a weak and predictable statement.

There is nothing inherently wrong with addressing the needs of the NHS, but to address it to the exclusion of the legitimacy of the wider and likely future roles is a mistake.  Indeed, the NHS is a stakeholder in the development of these professions, but should not be given too much authority or control over how the professions develop. When the state steps in, as it has in this case, it should do so with the assurance of fairness to the widest possible range of interests, and not just those that fits its current, and probably ideological, preferences.

In the end, the professions own themselves (in an important relationship with their regulator) and should act to ensure that they confront these issues responsibly. Is it a sign of weakness perhaps that this Commission was even needed? Perhaps therein lies a clue to the future of these professions: take responsibility for your profession, as if you don’t others will.

With public finances in most countries looking pretty challenged these days, what steps can central jurisdictions take to achieve two key health policy goals:

1. reduce the overall healthcare expenditure by bending the cost curve down,
2. improve productivity, value-for-money, health outcomes.

Few in government have much experience with reducing healthcare expenditures.  And ministers are rightfully fearful of voter wrath, so one must wonder where the political courage will come from in the first place. Perhaps the key thing is denial is not an option, neither is blame-fixing. The first rule, therefore, is to fix the problem, not the blame.  True statesmanship is now needed, more so than party political rhetoric; that is, of course if we are right that things are in a really bad way.

Few, too, in healthcare management have the necessary experience with substantial changes needed in healthcare delivery systems especially where resource constraints will need to similarly deliver productivity gains.  We’ve had tremendous growth in healthcare expenditure matched with uptake of new technologies, complex treatments, and greater clinical specialisation. We can simply do more, and it costs. But along with this rise in capability, there has been much less reform of the way healthcare is done. Clinical workflows continue to be clogged with unneeded activity; we still use expensive hospitals when less expensive polyclinics or primary care settings would do. We fail to exploit the full potential of the other health professions, such as nurses and pharmacists. The second rule, is that you cannot continue to fund an unreforming health system.

Reform must be a constant feature of healthcare, since it is so dynamic as an area of innovation. If we want to bend the cost curve down, we need to persist in reform, indeed, disruptive reform, creative destruction in healthcare service delivery.  It is not about being nasty as a finance minister, it is all about using the money to unleash creativity to the benefit of all.

The challenge is less how to do that though, than wondering why what is there about healthcare today that seems to keep that from happening in the first place. Now that is really something to wonder about.