Labour party conference: innovating for independence
Research Manager and Head of Health
Social care is a uniquely thorny subject for politicians. Policy discussions tend to universally elicit calls for more money – and rightly so. But Reform wanted to take a more optimistic approach. This panel discussion focused on how to maximise and scale innovation in social care, illuminating some fascinating use cases of advanced technology in social care delivery.
Reform hosted this panel on ‘Innovating for independence: a win win for health and social care’ with Anna Dixon MP, Melanie Williams (President, Association of Directors of Adult Social Care), Kate Lee (Chief Executive Officer, Alzheimer's Society), and Nick Weston (Chief Commercial Officer, Lilli) at Labour Party Conference.
Here are three key takeaways…
Results drive scalability
One of the biggest questions in innovation in health care is how you scale it across the system. Health and care is a particularly fragmented system: social care is run by local authorities while health care is run by Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), and a lot of different people within ICBs too. These are all localised and so success in one local authority doesn’t naturally filter to all of the other local authorities.
This highlights an eternal tension in devolution policy: standardisation versus local autonomy. How do you maintain local autonomy whilst scaling good ideas? And does centralisation equal standardisation? (FYI Reform believes it doesn’t, as you can read in Close enough to care.) Well the panel’s answer was that ‘good results drive scalability’. If you can make a strong enough use case, it will start to filter through the system.
Tech is an enabler not a substitute
The panel consistently emphasised the value of technology in social care, but only in the context that it is augmenting and supporting patient-centred care rather than replacing human care. This was a consistent theme among every single answer. There is a crucial relational element to social care that must always be maintained. What’s more, too much technology could in fact be isolating and lonely if all of a sudden physical carers were no longer needed. They may use less capacity on the system, but it could be a worse outcome for the patient, so has to be sensitively deployed.
Co-production is essential
Ensuring that technology innovations actually work and embed well into clinical processes is a problem across the health and care system. Indeed, for our Prescription for prevention report, GPs told us that they wanted to roll out more tech but they didn’t always have the change management skills needed to reimagine the workflow.
The panel built on this point and drew attention to the importance of co-production – designing an innovation independent from the process it is part of and the outcome it is supposed to be producing can substantially undermine its effectiveness. Co-production can be somewhat of a buzzword but it has real material value: imagining yourself in the position of the end user is a constructive and essential process for a service like social care where many of the recipients are vulnerable.