Why we are hosting the ‘What Unites Us?’ prize

Challenges surround how we do health, healthcare and social care. Too little money. Too much to do. Not enough care – for those doing the caring, as well as those being cared for.

So why is our ‘What Unites Us?’ prize – about a very different way for people working in health and care to start their careers – even remotely relevant? It’s not a stupid question. Three reasons.

1. Getting joint working wrong

We’re thinking about ‘joint working’ all wrong. Few disagree that the future of health and care is in people working more closely together, delivering ‘joined-up’, ‘holistic’ services. Around the world new organisational lifeforms (complete with shiny new acronyms) have emerged to try and help this happen, be that integrated care systems in England, or accountable care organisations in the US.

But these efforts to crudely nudge people to work together are happening far too late, coming way after different types of health and care professions have already established their own distinct cultures and ways of working.

We’re trying to shut the stable door, but the horses have long since bolted, and in very different directions. Instead, we need to start at the very beginning, when people are embarking on their health and care careers.

2. Disagreeing what healthcare is for

We don’t agree on what health and care is really for. In England more than £180bn of public money is spent on health and social care each year. Treated as a single organisation, the NHS alone is one of the biggest employers in the world, and the most common reason for people saying they are proud to be British.

But what is all this money, all this activity trying to do? To prolong life indefinitely, whatever state we’re in? To cure as many ailments as we can? To stop such illness arising in the first place?

As a country we don’t have a single agreed answer – and so, in this vacuum, each part of the health and care service can create their own. This happens even between doctors – for example, when asked, only 43% of GPs supported a change to allow drugs to be prescribed for patients to end their own life, compared with 63% of doctors in emergency medicine. We need far more up-front conversations about what the purpose of all this is.

Finding more creative ways to make careers in health and care appealing isn’t a nice to have, but a necessity.

3. Recruitment and retention challenge

Recruitment and retention will be the defining health and care challenge of this century. We’re used to seeing the ‘ageing population’ in lists of the key risks facing health and care – but it’s the increased difficulty in staffing services which is a far greater problem than the increase in people to be cared for.

More older people means proportionately fewer younger workers, which in turn means increasing competition for jobs. Globally, healthcare needs to go on the most almighty recruitment drive: 19 million extra jobs to fill by 2030, a growth of 29% in the time the world’s population will grow by only a third of that.

If health and care can’t find a way to appeal to a broader range of people than at present, it’s in real difficulty. Finding more creative ways to make careers in health and care appealing isn’t a nice to have, but a necessity.

Working to a common goal

‘What Unites Us?’ imagines a world where everyone starts their career in health and care with a short introductory interview – before the processes related to their specific job – to see if health and care was the right choice for them. An interview with three questions that gets to the very heart and soul of what working in health and care is all about.

This isn’t about solving the NHS’s workforce crisis in a single stroke. Nor is it about ripping up all existing recruitment processes for everyone from dentists to domiciliary care workers.

Rather, it is about everyone (and we do mean everyone) working in health and care starting from the same point, and knowing that everyone else has done so too. That, regardless of the specific role anyone sits in at any one time, there is an understanding and appreciation that we are all in this together, working to a common goal.

We hope you enjoy the shortlisted entries, along with a host of questions from the range of others who entered. And that it makes you think about what this means for you, whichever part of the health and care world you’re part of.

Join us for the prize giving event on 9 February.