The Friday Blog: More Than A Score
It has been a momentous week in our house. Daughter donned the blue blazer, emblazoned with the Tudor rose for the last time as she completed her final GCSE. Assuming she did well enough, the Sixth Form involves suits and choices. Uniforms at least are easy, but I suppose this is another step into womanhood where the choice of outfits become a considerably more involved exercise than the male default of pulling on a suit and being done with it. After she had completed her final paper (Spanish) I switched off the phone and drove her into Birmingham to mark the occasion with lunch for the two of us, reflecting on the fact that the past month had seen her sit no fewer than 21 papers, with the pressure to hit those top marks immense. I suppose it was ever thus, although the grading system seems to imply that far more students are operating at the very highest echelons than was ever the case when I did my “Os” a very long time ago. There was pressure back then, but it was never talked about that it might be detrimental to the mental health of individuals who were going through all sorts of other issues at that time of their lives.
Mental Health remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing working age people in our society, and it is well known that tonight, close to where you are reading this, the police cells and A&E Departments will be full of people in mental health crises, for whom a police cell or an A&E Department are the most accessible place of safety. I remember a few years ago, the good people from the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust launched a street triage service, and within weeks, the then CEO of University Hospitals Birmingham, Julie Moore, went public on the impact. Those of you who know Dame Julie will know that she is a formidable lady, and not easily impressed, but she noted an almost immediate and positive impact the service had at her front door. I thought of that this week when I had the enormous pleasure of co-hosting a dinner for members of ABHI’s Board with Birmingham Health Partners.
According to the official blurb, Birmingham Health Partners was established in 2015, and is a strategic alliance between nine University and NHS members who collaborate to deliver groundbreaking translational research, world-class education and training, and the highest quality patient care. The reason for our visit was to sign an MoU as part of our increasing efforts to develop collaboration with the NHS. Our focus will, increasingly, be on the type of collaboratives, like BHP, which will be showing system leadership as the NHS embarks on its next organisational journey, one, we are promised, which will move away from a highly centralised, top-down controlling bureaucracy, towards more localism and a neighbourhood-led health system. The opportunity for us in Birmingham is very significant. BHP members comprise over 50,000 staff, 5 million patient contacts annually and a combined turnover of £4.7 billion, operating in one of the UK’s most socially, ethnically and economically diverse areas. Birmingham is one of the youngest, but also the third-poorest city in the country. Please take the opportunity to review what is happening in our Second City, and be in touch if we can support your engagement.
My thoughts on mental health were prompted by the fact that we were very fortunate to have with us a number of Chief Medical Officers, including the one from BSMHFT. Another thing that has always been on my mind is the mental health of professional sports people, young people who have always been, physically, the best of the best in their cohorts. For some this will end with physical injury, when the asset that has steered them through life eventually lets them down. Quite how you process the fact that the body that has differentiated you from other mortals has stopped working in the same way, I am not sure. Even if players survive a premature exit, the loss of adulation can be hard to take, and not even for those that make it to the professional stage. If you want to really understand the psychological brutality of it all, you could do a lot worse than read Pulitzer winning author H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s 1990 masterpiece, “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream.” Forget the fact that you might not be a sports fan, this is one of the best books I have ever read, and is not so much about sport as America, racism, false promises and devastated dreams.
Cue last weekend, and the final of the English Premiership, which I hyped up last week. Dan Cole, one of Leicester Tigers’ best ever, and a 100 cap international was playing his final game, and a fairytale ending beckoned. Entering the game with 10 minutes left and his side behind, but in contention, he had been on the field less than two minutes when he was given a yellow card for a late tackle on the Bath fly half, Finn Russell. Cole, a legend of English, if not World rugby, spent his final few minutes as a professional athlete, in the sin bin. Afterwards he was seen weeping in the arms of his former teammate Tom Croft. Also bowing out was Cole’s colleague, England’s most capped ever player, the scrum half, Ben Youngs. With a minute remaining, and his team two points down, Youngs elected to kick the ball rather than try and pass it to his flyers outside. It did not work out the way he had hoped, and effectively ended his career and his team’s hopes. Youngs' decision was explicable, even if the kick was not perfectly executed, but many have questioned it, and he will, for the rest of his life, have to justify, not least to himself, what he chose to do. Cole has an altogether different scenario to deal with. Nobody, outside the city, roots for the Tigers, regarded as arrogant over achievers for too many years, but I have to say on Saturday the referee was not exactly on Leicester’s side. Nobody will begrudge Bath the title, but some very ordinary decisions went in their favour, and the one to dismiss Cole was perhaps the worst I have seen at that level. Cole was in a legitimate position to charge down Russell’s kick and attempted to do so, what happens after that is a “rugby incident.” There was no foul play and no reason to award a penalty, let alone the one that sealed the game and a dismissal to boot. Those last few moments should not define the careers of two truly great players, but I fear they will be haunted by them.
If you have still not caught up with the Spending Review, you might do worse than review the conversation I had with Rosie Beacon and Tony Bellis on Monday. Otherwise, the NHS was always going to be one of the big “winners”, but despite a real terms increase in the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) budget of £29 billion (3%) over the next three years, many questions remain unanswered. At face value, the Spending Review starts to build on how to deliver on Wes Streeting’s ‘Three Shifts’. But, there is a lack of clarity on how the DHSC will deliver in more strategic terms. We will be making sense of that in the coming weeks as we await the publication of the 10 Year Health Plan, not to mention our own Sector Plan as part of the Industrial Strategy. In fact, commentary on both will be our main thought-leading output over the next couple of months, so, as the crescendo of OOOs starts to greet Johnny Fandango’s inbox, and with me Ullswater bound as you read this, it is time for the Friday Blog to take its Summer break. Enjoy yours, there is an England v India series, not to mention the Lions in Australia over the next month. Whatever you do, do it safely. The Doctor has signed us up to a night swim in the lake, and swimming is not my strongest suit. Hopefully I will be back in September to make sense of whatever it is the World throws at our sector in the meantime. Until then.
