HFMA 2019: Consultation starts on finance future vision

The report – Designing our future: better decisions, better health – has been prepared by the HFMA working with Future-Focused Finance and PwC in response to a challenge from the Finance Leadership Council.

The report imagines a future where the NHS is seen as the best place to work for finance staff, where diversity helps to drive innovation and where finance staff are widely recognised for their contribution to delivering good patient outcomes.

Introducing the report, Simon Worthington, director of finance at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and a member of the Finance Leadership Council, said it was an attempt to think about what the function needed to start, stop or do differently.

‘But this is only the beginning of the process,’ he said. Now we want the whole 16,000 strong finance function to engage so that we end up with a vision that everyone has had a chance to contribute to and we’ve got the commitment of the whole function to what we need to do over the next years.’

A series of events will be held in the new year and a social media-style platform will enable broader engagement.

The report explores the need for the function to work more collaboratively as the service increasingly moves towards system working. And it examines the impact of technology and the different roles that finance staff will adopt. (See Healthcare Finance, December 2019 for full analysis).

Speaking at a panel session as part of the report’s launch, Kathy Roe, chief finance officer of Tameside and Glossop Clinical Commissioning Group and Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, said finance staff would need to think really creatively and be about much more than numbers and spreadsheets. ‘It is about challenge and getting the best value for the money invested,’ she said.

She added that finance had the advantage of being able to ‘knock on any door’ and its view of all the intelligence and information meant it was ‘the best asset any organisation has’. Collaboration across systems would also be vital to stop different organisations ‘fighting over the same pound’.

Mr Worthington (pictured) said that finance staff should not be fearful about technology. ‘Artificial intelligence and other developments – we will need to do that and it will be better but we have to do it in a way that makes people feel engaged. That’s because, if you’ve got an engaged team, they are also a more productive team.’

The panel, chaired by HFMA 2018/19 president Bill Gregory, was asked what single issue they would like to measure and improve that they don’t report on today. Caroline Clarke, group chief executive at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust said this was carbon. ‘The biggest issue facing all of us is the environment,’ she said. ‘So the very least we can do as a finance profession is use some of our quantitative abilities and challenging tendencies to measure and reduce our carbon footprint.

‘Things like Scan for Safety are so important and we have a moral duty to do that stuff – so for me that’s the number one.’

Sanjay Agrawal, respiratory consultant at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, said that he’d like to see secondary care quantifying what it did to address health inequalities. ‘I don’t believe it is in any of our annual reports. But once you start measuring it, you can start addressing it.’

The panel also discussed mobility of finance staff across different parts of the NHS finance system. Mr Worthington said this was a problem that had been driven by the purchaser-provider split and the era of competition. Moves towards system working were now bringing people together, but the service should not wait for further big changes or to be told to do it. ‘Let’s start making small steps now,’ he said. ‘[Providers], have you invited your commissioning finance team to your finance time out for instance? We can all do things to get to know each other in the system.’

Ms Clarke said she’d benefitted from working in five or six different parts of the system by the time she was 25, thanks to the graduate finance training scheme. Could similar experience be offered through shared apprentice schemes. ‘Find a few things you can work on collectively with other organisations and build up trust and relationships while doing this,’ she said.

There was also a recognition that it will be particularly important to meet the needs of younger finance professionals both in how the function operates, how staff are supported and in the ability to work flexibly. ‘The next generation of the workforce will be the biggest critical success factor in terms of whether we achieve what we want to in finance and how we support the NHS in delivering its long-term plans,’ said Ms Roe. ‘So it is about engagement, but it is probably the younger group that we need to ask most what they need the finance function of the function to look like.’