Comment / Learnt offerings

We haven’t been inundated with applications to take up a bursary, although we have provided some financial assistance for individual study tours to Australia and France. We have, however, made firm links with HEAD, the Dutch healthcare finance managers association, and tentative contact with the German healthcare system, and have visited New Zealand with our colleagues from ACCA.

This final study tour took place in October with the ACCA/HFMA delegation aiming to discover whether there were any aspects of the New Zealand system that could inform the development of our own healthcare systems back home. You will be able to read more about our conclusions in a forthcoming series of articles in Healthcare Finance.

Our connection with the US extends back over 30 years and we are fully committed to exchanging knowledge and ideas. The US healthcare system offers some interesting parallels in terms of problems and, often, dramatically different solutions.

Next year we will again be running the UK/US Exchange programme. This time the pairing/shadowing part of the programme will be in the US while the conference will be held in Toronto, Canada. This mirrors our approach in 2007, which saw our first international healthcare finance conference held in Paris. If you would like to take part in next year’s conference, contact Hannah Jack ([email protected]).

In September, our US colleagues are to visit Russia for a week-long tour. The aims will be to extend their knowledge about how the Russian system works. If there are some members who are interested in participating, I would be grateful if you could register your interest directly with me. The Russian trip will provide some interesting insights into a completely different method of healthcare delivery. If you are interested, please contact me ([email protected]).

We also ran the first Dutch Exchange this last month and are interested in developing an exchange with the New Zealand system, where there is an appetite for knowledge about the English system.

Finally, I would like to draw members’ attention back to the bursary scheme. If any member identifies a suitable topic, country and outputs, we will part-fund a trip to a maximum of £1,000. The key in all cases will be the learning and how it might be applied in the UK. The experience from our study tours is that there is no substitute for seeing systems and practices first hand.


Contact HFMA’s international officer, Phil Taylor ([email protected]), for more details and to discuss opportunities.