Comment / Targeting the Oz zone

I was recently fortunate enough to attend an HFMA study tour to Australia organised jointly with ACCA.  The tour was part of our Beyond our Borders initiative and was designed to pick out those bits of policy that could offer pointers for the development of policy in the UK.  I am not going to describe the activities on the tour as we intend to issue an HFMA briefing in the next couple of months. But I wanted to talk about the potential for an exciting by-product – the possibility of an exchange programme.

While we were in Australia, we came across two organisations that could partner us in developing a programme.  There was also a degree of interest from Australian colleagues about this when it was mooted in meetings. 

The idea would be for a party of, say, 10 to travel to Australia, possibly pairing up, as in the US programme, with Australian colleagues.  There would in my view need to be some exposure to the Commonwealth government in Canberra, but after that delegates could travel to various parts of Australia to sample the different state systems.

I would envisage this programme taking place in the winter – possibly January or February. The idea then would be that the UK delegates would come back home and there would be some knowledge sharing at some form of conference day to enable everyone to debrief. 

At that day I would expect the delegates to gain a sense of how different each state is in Australia and the tensions with the Commonwealth government.

The second leg would occur in the UK probably in our summer and once again we would probably use the pairing system for that to enable colleagues to be able to tailor a programme based on their organisational and individual interests.  There may be a second sharing day.  I am sure the Australians would benefit from that and we would obviously need to provide some closure on the programme for it to end to everyone’s satisfaction.  It’s not just English colleagues who may be interested as in some ways the population sizes of some states are nearer to those in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The idea is still in the formative stages but I wanted to float the possibility of this programme and see who might be interested.  There will probably be a small administrative charge to the HFMA to cover the cost of organising it and the rest would be flights, accommodation and subsistence, which of course provides delegates with some flexibility.  The most important thing to say is the obvious one – it’s a long way, so we need to plan time to get there and adjust to the timings.

I think this programme does offer some significant benefit to visit a system like our own and I would be very interested to hear from anyone who might be keen.  If there is a big enough group, I will be able to go back to my Australian colleagues with a view to organising a planning workshop in the early summer where we can discuss how we would like to structure the programme.