Britain’s National Health Service Visits D.C. For Some Pointers – Kaiser Health News.
Nice article in Kaiser Health News (@KHNews) [which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente] about ongoing visits from leaders in the National Health Service and beyond that are coordinated by Kaiser Permanente International.
Ankita Rao (@anrao) spent the morning observing the interchange between the two health systems, it is good to see this from the journalist’s point of view 🙂
One small errata and a comment or two:
- My actual title is “Physician Director, Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health (@kptotalhealth)” – I do this in partnership with an Executive Director, who is Keith Montgomery (@kmontgomeryndc). There isn’t a Total Health Clinic, but there is a Kaiser Permanente Capitol Hill Medical Center next door. We realize this can get confusing, luckily I can unconfuse here…
- There’s a comment about our system being physician led and the impact on costs – I would say that physician leadership deployed correctly is what keeps costs low – when they are trained as servant leaders, to enable innovation and build trust. That’s what all Permanente physicians sign up for to learn when they join. The key is to respect capabilities and respect that leadership comes from many parts and professions in the health system. It’s what we emulate at the Center for Total Health (see my comment about having an Executive Director).
As the article correctly points out, out systems are not perfect. If they were, we wouldn’t go to the effort to teach what we do. The secret of all of this is that even though on these visits we’re the teachers, we also sneak in a little bit of being the learners.
Thanks NHS Northwest Leadership Academy (@NHSNWLA) and Kaiser Permanente International for coming together in our humble space to talk about and shape the future of health.