Comment / HFMA 2014: FFF finance educators call

At the HFMA conference in London, the workstream senior
responsible officer Sanjay Agrawal – a consultant in respiratory and intensive care medicine at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust – said he wanted to hear from all NHS organisations early in the new year.

He highlighted one problem facing non-finance professionals – while some organisations show a deficit using brackets, others do not. Some use a negative sign.

‘You can see as a clinician why I get confused,’ he said. ‘The last time I had financial education was in medical school, decades ago. You might assume we know about finance, but we don’t – that makes it harder for us to change services, so we need you to educate us. We want to set up a finance educator network. In every NHS organisation – clinical commissioning groups, commissioning support units and provider trusts – we want one or more who will get out, meet clinicians and help us understand it. As a by-product you will hear much more about clinical services.’

He added FFF would support the educators, first by training them on how to teach. Training materials would be supplied and FFF would provide support when they first start to work with clinicians.