Healthcare Insights | Global Trends of Healthcare Transformation

The UK has a National Healthcare System (NHS) that in some respect is known for its equal access, but there are also debates around the NHS. 

The University of Manchester has traditionally been working alongside the NHS delivering healthcare leadership development programmes for over 60 years; and in the recent near decade, assisting a growing number of international students from healthcare management, practice, technology as well as investment on a full-time Healthcare Management Master. 

In discussion of the global trends in different healthcare systems and experience to be borrowed, China Centre invited two experts for an interview. Dr. Stephen Brookes QPM from Alliance Manchester Business School and Dr. Kathy Shi CEO & Founder of Sino-United Health Clinic. 

In China, government health insurance has been extending to cover from 400 million urban populations to 1.4 billion including rural population since 2009. Also government insurance is covering a growing percentage of patients’ cost, but there are still variance between big cities and small cities.

In the UK, it’s the 70th birthday for NHS, which has been providing healthcare free at the point of delivery, but still there are huge inequalities in access to healthcare. Recent years, it has been calculated that inequality in healthcare costs the NHS 20 billion GBP per annum.

Technology is a trend and it allows the launch of online booking systems, so patients can book online and for some clinics and hospitals even via Wechat. Government reform policy is supporting provision from the private sector and encouraging training in healthcare.

Reform in different parts of the world has seen in provision of healthcare to the private sector. Investment in private healthcare is increasing in places such as Gulf Cooperating Countries in the Middle East and Singapore for example. In the UK, reform has been ongoing over the 70 years of the NHS. The current main reform is through the creation of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG). 

The funding for healthcare from the Ministry of Health around 160 billion GBP per annum is given directly to CCG, which is General Practice (GP) led and commissions the service through secondary and tertiary care. The patient would go see the family physician/GP, who then refers him to see specialist doctors if there are particular needs.

One main challenge of government reform is to reduce waiting time.  Also another Key element of reform in the UK, is TCS, Transforming Community Services – which transfers the care to people in the community rather than main hospitals.

In China, GP system or family physician is not generally in place. But here usually we can get access to hospitals more quickly. And people tend to go to tertiary hospitals once they get sick. The government is trying to encourage people to go to the community hospitals first – this would allow better allocation of the resources.

The online aspect of technology increases convenience of access.

The real test of technology is not the real technology itself, but the capability and capacity behind that technology. For example, booking an appointment with a GP while there is little availability would in fact defeat that system. Other aspects of technology, such as monitoring patients over distance would revolutionize how healthcare is provided and have huge impact for rural areas. Also, technology can help provision of integrated healthcare.

I think that has big implication in telemedicine such as quarantine disease management for the rural area. But this needs a combination of online and onsite-visit because safety is always the top priority.

Another aspect of benefit is the preventative agenda through monitoring with electronic devices.

Not too much technology is good, because it could cause unnecessary anxiety such as through patients seeing fast heart-rate from Fitbit and over-react.

Over the years, I have seen common challenges for numerous Healthcare system: 4 common challenges for healthcare to summarize are:

I believe prevention is even more important than treatment. A lot of it is through education, integrated service through good patient education.

An old saying in China: Doctors have the heart like your parents – Doctors become doctors because we want to help people. Healthcare providers can do better and patients can understand better. Communication is for sure very important. Healthcare provider can try to provide better quality care – they need to make sure they spend enough time on patients, explaining and evaluating, respect and also have good bedside manner. In the meantime, patients understand better.

It is also a very important in the UK, top priority for the Department of Health. Patients are much better informed today, and can be much better engaged in the relationship with the physician. We hear sad news that some physicians got killed which is absolutely tragic and should not be allowed to happen. This relationship is multi-faceted. 

As healthcare providers, if we want to provide high quality care, we must engage the patient. The patient must trust you, otherwise they cannot be engaged. In our organization, we do it in this way and we have more time spent on the patient. We need to have the passion.

Passion is absolutely key and the other word is trust. In a national survey of trust level for occupations, we found that for physicians and doctors to be on the top of the list, and we don’t want to lose that.

Contact China Centre for detailed programme information and application guidance