Webchat with Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England, Friday 8 September at 1pm

[BojanaMumsnet]

Hello

We’re pleased to announce a webchat with the CEO of NHS England, Simon Stevens, on Friday 8 September at 1pm.

NHS England leads the National Health Service in England, setting the priorities and direction of the NHS to improve health and care. Simon is accountable to Parliament for over £100 billion of annual health service funding. You may know him from his appearances in front of Commons select committees which have occasionally hit the headlines.

Simon joined the NHS in 1988 and became a frontline NHS manager, leading acute hospitals, mental health and community services, primary care and health commissioning across different parts of England. He also served seven years as the Prime Minister’s Health Adviser at 10 Downing Street, and as policy adviser to successive Health Secretaries at the Department of Health. He has been leading NHS England since 2014. Simon is married with two school-age children.

Please do join the chat on Friday at 1pm, or if you can’t make it, leave a question here in advance. Please do share the webchat on social - the more, the merrier!

As always, please remember our webchat guidelines - one question each, follow-ups if there’s time and please keep it civil.

Thanks
MNHQ

@ChoudeBruxelles

If you could start the NHS again (NHS 2.0) what would you do differently?

The way we fund the NHS hasn't changed, but the type of care and the needs of the patients obviously has changed, and the NHS has been changing with it, year in year out, for nearly 70 years. Obviously there have been huge changes in the population, and in medical treatment. For example, one in three baby girls born in an NHS hospital today are likely to live to more than 100. So with an ageing population, part of what we've got to do is get better at joining up homecare, nursing home care, GP care, hospital care for frail older people. Part of what we've got to do is make much better use of technology for younger people - and for Gransnet users! And part of what we've got to do is take advantage of the huge advances in cancer treatment/care and other major treatments that we can see are going to be coming online over the next few years.

Do you support the 1% pay cap? And how much longer do you think the NHS can continue to run with poorly paid and over-worked staff? The mass exodus of doctors abroad and nurses to various agencies is, at least in part, due to the very poor wages the NHS pay.

@DontTellTheBride

Hi,

Do you think the NHS will still be here in 50 years' time?

Yes, I do.

Next year the NHS turns 70 and the commitment of both the public and the staff to it's future is as strong as ever.

There seems to be many people leaving the NHS to work privately or abroad. The more that people leave, the worse conditions get and the spiral continues. What incentives are there for people to stay in the NHS instead of working elsewhere?
Maybe something like less student debt for those that train in the NHS and stay working there for 5 years, or something similar?

Also why isn't there more encouragement to employ staff instead of using bank staff?

Finally, thank you for the chance to chat. The fact that so many people have joined this speaks volumes about the things the NHS gets right, the things we know we want to do better, and the importance of the health service to the country as a whole.

• maybe there needs to be That was meant to say

The fact that so many people have joined this speaks volumes about the things the NHS gets right, the things we know we want to do better, and the importance of the health service to the country as a whole.

I think so many people have joined this chat because they have had awful experiences and are scared for the future of the NHS. That's what keeps me awake at night.

I knew I'd get no answer. Oh well. I had to try.

Thanks Simon for an interesting chat. Really good news about the mother and baby units.

Neat sidestepping around deeply political questions but I guess that comes with the job

Thanks for this webchat Simon. Glad to hear you're confident about the NHS's future

This was a very naive, weak webchat.

Cowgirlsareforever is absolutely right and Simon's response shows where the problem lies: NHS LEADERS JUST DON'T GET IT.

The fact that so many people have joined this speaks volumes about the things the NHS gets right, the things we know we want to do better, and the importance of the health service to the country as a whole.

No it doesn't. Like many of the responses here by Simon that make assumptions about what we all feel, just because he wants them to be true does not make them so. The fact that so many people joined this webchat doesn't speak volumes about the things the NHS gets right, it speaks volumes about all the things the NHS gets wrong.

I didn't see any decent response that would make me feel the NHS is in safe, competent and intelligent hands in any of that.

Quite agree, BusinessWoman. My question was, as I predicted, ignored. It raised the serious concerns that parents of children with congenital heart conditions have that their regional unit in Leicester is about to be closed. Right now, this unit is one of the things that the NHS gets right - it is outstanding. Yet if closed, it will become an example of the NHS getting things very, very wrong, as critically ill babies are diverted from the East Midlands to Leeds, London and Birmingham.

Simon answered my question on postnatal mental health and gave extra/new info so that was good.
However he was very flippant about the things keeping him awake at night etc. and seemed to want to make out that it's all roses. It's clearly not all roses, the NHS is on its goddamn knees.

Yy, saveglenfield. He ignored my question about closures too, and all the questions about mental health provision etc. Not enough engagement with the real issues here.

He ignored all the difficult questions and padded out what he did write with meaningless jolly-it's-all-good-don't-blame-me-blame-the-government platitudes.

Ignored both my questions too Very poor performance on this webchat in my opinion. Just ignored all the difficult questions.

Having read the whole thread and as a frontline NHS worker this interview with the NHS CEO does not reassure me at all. He trots out the party line and doesn't acknowledge the current funding and organisational model which may have worked 60 years ago is unfit for the healthcare demands of the 21st century. We are facing massive clinical needs with insufficient reasources to deal with it safely. I think the NHS has abandoned effective risk management because this costs money to implement and there will many more avoidable deaths as a result. I for one and probably Simon Stevens are counting the days to retirement because of the stress of working in an organisation which Has the inevitability of the Titanic heading towards the iceberg.

The cynic in me thinks that this was all planned by the NHS England media team to allow him to make a nice announcement. Now tweeting about his "announcement...of better care for expectant and new mums with mental health." twitter.com/NHSEngland/status/906163484156727296

I think you're right SaveGlenfield.

He is so constrained by his position to tow some lines that I didn't mind a flippant answer (my bad for not asking work worries). However, I didn't like this answer:

"But we also think there's more savings to be made, in administrative costs, to the tune of at least another £250m over the next three years, which will be put into patient care instead."

no no no :(, they don't need drive for more cost savings, they need massively more investment. Nobody likes to admit that (sigh).

But we also think there's more savings to be made, in administrative costs, to the tune of at least another £250m over the next three years, which will be put into patient care instead.

That's such an extraordinarily unintelligent thing to say, but classically political and nonsensical.

What administrative costs exactly? Typists? Management experts? IT? Office leases? Mobile phone contracts? Lunches for NHS meetings?

No leader should ever make such a meaningless comment as that. That answer was in response to a comment about management specifically.

If the NHS stopped hiring relatively cheap managers who have spent their lives in the NHS and don't know how things can be done and would never survive outside the NHS, and invested more in hiring smart, astute business people who have seen the outside world and could deliver bigger better results, faster that increased investment would pay off massively.

But no. Every advert says "must have worked in the NHS before". And so the NHS gets the same old same old, and the problems never get fixed.

Well I missed this, but am impressed that SS opened himself up to MN!

Good leadership starts from the top, maybe now some of his middle manager's might grow a pair.

Hi Simon,

I have a question about fat people.

I am fat. Always have been. Probably always will be. Am happy fat and not ignorant fat - i.e. not fat because I don't know about healthy eating but fat because I happily eat too much.

But the stigmatisation of fat people is very upsetting. Why should we be penalised for being fat for example when you don't ration knee operations for joggers. We all willingly and knowingly do things that have health implications, but the anti fat thing has got out of control.

When I struggled to conceive for example the doctors all said lose weight. I said yes ok but what if that isn't the cause - you need to take a twin approach to working out the problem. Lose weight and investigate other possible causes (I actually conceived when I was at my heaviest in the end) - correlation is not causation etc.

So here is my question - do you agree the NHS is fattist and can you bloody well stop it.

Cheers.

^^ You might struggle with this one. SS is known to have lost 3 stone himself in the past and is a zealot for people getting active.

He ignored all the difficult questions and padded out what he did write with meaningless jolly-it's-all-good-don't-blame-me-blame-the-government platitudes. This I think is very unfair. SS got nowhere with Cameron and Osborne because their minds were made up not to support the NHS with further investment. He can't be blamed for their joint erosion of the NHS.

Wait until this winter's crisis. We may see May's so-called government having to wake up to the fact that the health of the nation is somewhat reliant on the health of its population.