The University of Manchester hosted over 25 delegates for this year’s Health Policy and Politics annual meeting for two days of presentations and networking at the end of April. As ever, there was enormous diversity in the themes of the research presented, from the history of NHS workforce planning to managing heat stress in Thai sugar cane workers. HPPN also invited submissions of work in varying stages of progress, from initial paper ideas to published work.
We were delighted to be joined by Thea Stein, Chief Executive of the Nuffield Trust who gave this year’s keynote. Thea drew on her clinical, managerial, and thinktank experience to reflect on productivity in health and care. Her reflections included the language used around productivity by politicians, managers, and the media, apportioning of blame, and a lack of evidence-based and safe and supportive discussions about how to make productivity work. Thea ended her keynote by suggesting the need for a “productivity truce” to enable more meaningful and insightful conversations about how to best use health and care resources and what is really needed.
HPPN is a key opportunity to showcase historic and political analysis of health and care policy to a captive audience. Michael Lambert’s whistlestop tour of NHS workforce planning from 1948 to 1997 outlined a recurring “planning by numbers” approach to workforce planning, and inclusion of archive documents piqued everyone’s interest to kick off day two. Martin Powell and Hareth Al-Janabi critiqued different approaches to calculating NHS funding and the limitations of these. Paul Atkinson presented a soon-to-be published history of NICE and the intersection of objective clinical guidelines with the political landscape. We were returned to the Covid pandemic with Richard Gleave’s assessment of the Isle of Wight’s test and trace pilot, which sparked debate as to the use of language around pilots and early implementers. Bringing us into the present – and future – Steve Iliffe and Richard Bourne mused on how Labour could “save the NHS” in 2024 with an impending UK general election.
Reform of primary care – particularly general practice – was a common theme this year. Imelda McDermott presented the findings of a study exploring perceptions of primary care staff of the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme, which sought to resource additional staff such as pharmacists, paramedics and physiotherapists in general practice. Jon Hammond discussed GP access during Covid in the context of boundary work and the phenomenon of “controlling space” throughout the pandemic. Demonstrating HPPN is often at the cutting edge of policy as it develops, Donna Bramwell’s work on the role of GPs in occupational health services was presented against a policy backdrop of major changes announced by the UK government in how fitness to work would be assessed. Jess Drinkwater concluded the conference with an exploration of the extent to which general practice should – and can – engage more meaningfully with the communities they serve, and the opportunities and barriers associated with this wider role. An international perspective of general practice was brought by Amanda Rasmussen who presented some fascinating (and at times amusing!) quotes of myths about general practice in the context of organisational change.
Protecting and advocating for vulnerable or under-represented communities – both patients and staff – came though in several presentations. Lynsey Warwick-Giles presented an overview of the role different national and local stakeholders play in addressing systemic health inequalities. Annie Sorbie and Gemma Hughes combined two recent projects to discuss the conceptualisation of vulnerability, both medically and socially in the context of patients and staff. Finally, Adrian Wright presented the findings of an NHS pilot to address workplace conflict differently, based on the principles of restorative justice, compassion, and a just learning culture.
The relationship between academia and policymaking is an underlying theme of all of HPPN’s work, and Petra Makela brought this to the forefront with her presentation on tacit knowledge exchange in academic-policy engagement.
HPPN has a long tradition of supporting PhD students and early career researchers, and we were delighted to host 7 PhD students to present their work. Last year’s winner of the Steve Harrison Award for best student presentation, Francis Ayomoh presented his thesis chapter on task-shifting in maternity services in Nigeria. An international policy theme was strong amongst PhD projects, with Adwoa Agyemang-Benneh presenting the findings of her fieldwork in Ghana, examining the role of state and non-state actors on primary care reform, which had some interesting and unexpected comparisons with primary care policy in the English NHS. Nour Al-Quraan gave a comprehensive summary of Jordan’s health policies framed around equality and equity, which again linked smoothly to how health inequalities are being conceptualised in many other countries. International occupational and environmental health policy was a key theme of Tadpong Tantipanjaporn’s and Budsakorn Chommueang’s presentations on heat stress in sugar cane workers and residential rat control management respectively, which showcased the broad range of health policy areas covered by HPPN.
Closer to home, Melissa Surgey presented the findings of her recently completed PhD thesis which proposed re-framing the role of health and care commissioners as relationship managers in integrated care. Verity Jones used the context-mechanism-outcomes framework to explore co-production in youth mental health services which brought a patient focus to proceedings. At the closing of the conference, Verity was awarded the Steve Harrison Award for her engaging presentation and the importance of her research area.
This year we decided to run single sessions – rather than parallel – with slightly shorter presentations to fully showcase the breadth of HPPN members’ work and enable everyone to engage with all presentations. We hope the programme demonstrated the wide-reaching scope – geographically, topically, and theoretically – that HPPN welcomes.
A highlight of HPPN is the opportunity to network with members, with new and familiar faces making connections, and many delegates enjoying a conference dinner at local arts venue HOME. We look forward to seeing you next year.
About the author
Melissa is a Research Associate in the Health Organisation, Policy and Economics (HOPE) research group and Centre for Primary Care and Health Services Research. She is currently working on a post-implementation review of the Health and Care Act 2022, commissioned by the NIHR’s Policy Research Programme. This follows on from her PhD research which examined the form and function of commissioning in the new health and care system in England.
Prior to joining The University of Manchester, Melissa was a senior manager in the National Health Service (NHS) and is able to apply her experience of policymaking, strategic planning, commissioning and corporate governance to her research, as well as providing teaching support on the MPH Introduction to Health Policy unit.
hppnuk.wordpress.com 