The Perils of Industrialised Healthcare: Exploring the limitations of the King's Fund report: "Reforming the NHS from Within"

The King's Fund's report Reforming the NHS from Within questions the wisdom of decades of structural reform within the NHS. The report's author, Professor Chris Ham, argues that a confused cocktail of markets, regulations and targets has detracted from more positive possibilities. He offers a more human account of the kinds of changes that would help strengthen the NHS. But does the King's Fund's critique go far enough? David Zigmond argues that there are even graver issues to consider. The National Health Service, at its best is about supporting and sustaining thoughtful, caring and knowledgeable relationships between professionals and citizens. But too many managerial initiatives undermine agency and harm relationships. Treating staff like robots, or patients like items on a conveyor belt, is dehumanising and dangerous. Much more attention needs to be given to the factors that strengthen our relationships: Doing things at a human scale - not progressively more giant Working with trust and flexibility - not meaningless regulations Providing security and freedom - not financial penalties and incentives Zigmond's work explores the limits of industrialised healthcare and calls for fresh thinking about how to restore and protect the human dimension of the NHS. David Zigmond is a veteran NHS medical practitioner who has, increasingly, devoted himself to repersonalising the NHS. This has been fuelled by his perception of the last three decades of serial reforms and systematisations: each seems to squeeze yet more intelligence, life and humanity from our healthcare interactions - both with colleagues and patients. Zigmond has worked as a frontline NHS doctor for the better (and worst) part of fifty years. His two main jobs have been as a traditional small practice family doctor and a large hospital psychiatrist and psychotherapist: in all of these he came to see (the now-imperilled) personal continuity of care as vital to much of our best care. Throughout this time he has spent the smaller fraction of his time working as a private psychotherapist. For many years Zigmond has written about his wide-ranging experiences and his ideas of how to make sense of them. This has been contiguous to his teaching of healthcarers and psychotherapists.