Cambridge Judge Business School Discussions on Health Management

Research into the provision of healthcare support for outpatient medical services, led by Dr Houyuan Jiang, University Senior Lecturer in Management Science at Cambridge Judge Business School, concludes that a unified Performance-Based Contract approach with threshold penalties would achieve the best outcomes for outpatients.

David Halpern, Director of the Behavioural Insights Team at the Cabinet Office, and Professor Andrew Gamble of the University of Cambridge, says subjective well-being measurements are empowering citizens.

High and low scoring countries on the 'Well-Being' index tell us much about our own lifestyles and what makes us happy says Nic Marks, Founder of the Centre for Well-Being. Costa Rica does well.

The BBC's Claudia Hammond says earning a salary of over £20k doesn't necessarily make you any happier but job losses do matter - so will employment policies really change to incorporate 'well-being'?

Professor Felicia Huppert, Director of the Well-Being Institute, Jen Beaumont, Office of National Statistics, and Dr Simon Learmount, Director of the Executive MBA at Cambridge Judge Business School, say why well-being matters and how we measure it.

How do we measure 'well-being' and what is its importance to individuals and society? What matters to you?

Dr Peter Piot, Director of the Institute for Global Health, Imperial College, draws on his experience at the United Nations to explain why Aids needs business to provide the leadership of the future. Good leadership, he says, is about running programmes not based on opinion polls but on what is good for society.

Professor Dame Sandra Dawson led a team of consultants who advised the Department of Health on the establishment of their recently announced National Leadership Council, which has been designed to champion leadership in the NHS as it enters a new stage of reform. She explains that in order to achieve true transformational change, leadership for large and diverse organisations needs to encourage, guide and support development from the grassroots up through the use of leadership pipelines and mentoring.

The recent Darzi report recommends an increase in clinical leadership in the NHS. Whilst Professor Stefan Scholtes believes it is important to have more clinicians on the board, he cautions that this approach needs to be thoughtfully implemented; "haven't we been here before during the first fifty years of the last century when hospitals and organisations were lead by clinicians… we ended up bringing in managers as the clinicians couldn't organise the finances". Professor Scholtes argues that the key is to motivate clinicians to want to become managers, and to then train them up, equipping them with the necessary managerial skills to make economically sensible decisions about the distributions of resources. Their deep-seated professional perspective combined with an over-arching view of the 'system' will lead to innovations in the services and even greater beneficial efficiencies in the future.

Dr Jenny Dean says NHS managers may well have to bite the bullet and accept a pay freeze in the coming year, but if it is executed in the right way and shown to benefit the NHS it may not demotivate staff. The right leadership is key to implementing such top down decisions that directly impact on people's pay, lifestyles and pensions, she says, but if NHS leaders engage with managers to make them see the longer term benefits it will make any freeze easier to shoulder.

Pam Garside's new report 'Out of Hospital Care - Lessons from the US' explains why technological advances that have lead to the development of pressure sensitive carpets, talking pill bottles that say when to take medicine and applications for mobile phones will enable patients to be successfully treated at home in the UK.

Obama's new Health Bill will reform care all over the world says Dr Jim Rice