Tag: Innovation
Einstein’s Insanely Simple Guide To Fixing The NHS
The NHS is in trouble.
How much trouble?
Well…how long is a piece of string?
At a micro level, you’ve got the frustration of Medics who are overworked, inadequately supported, and silently struggling with depression and suicide.
And at a macro level, you’ve got the usual suspects of: hospital closures, huge waiting times, poor allocation of resources…not to mention the role of Brexit in exacerbating these issues.
So the question is: what can we do to fix things? How can we make things better?
Answer: ask a genius outside the NHS to help us fix it.
A genius like…Albert Einstein.
Even though he’s been dead for over 60 years, his brilliance has lived on, through online memes featuring statements like:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
However, if you had to pick just ONE of Einstein’s many brilliant insights and apply it to fixing the NHS, I believe it would be this one:
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Think crazy
If you were to sum up the history of human innovation in just 5 words, it would look like this:
Today’s brilliance was yesterday’s bonkers.
Switching from horses to cars…crazy.
Flying through the air in a metallic aircraft…crazy.
Running a mile in under 4 minutes…crazy.
Convincing Doctors to wash their hands with soap…crazy.
Women voting, a black President of the USA, the telephone, the Internet, driverless cars, space travel to Mars…
Today’s brilliance was yesterday’s bonkers.
This means that the cure for cancer, or AIDS or cystic fibrosis could be hiding in plain sight…disguised as a ludicrously impractical “mad hatter”.
This means that the solution to that extremely complex situation that you’re dealing with is probably much simpler than you dare to imagine.
This means that the key to solving the global healthcare challenges facing humanity…is simply empowering and encouraging each of us to think and look like one of “the crazy ones”.
Get some sleep, do some aerobic exercise, and think differently for 10 minutes each morning.
That’s how practical this idea is.
Given humanity’s excellent track record in seeing a brilliant innovation and quickly dismissing it as crazy, ridiculous or impossible…it stands to reason that we should be more intentional about exploring today’s crazy in order to discover tomorrow’s normal.
In other words, make time each day to think differently…to think crazy.
How do we do that, particularly in a highly regulated, litigation-rife industry such as healthcare?
Or even more importantly, how do you become more intentional about exploring the ideas and interests that you’ve earmarked as impractical, impossible or “for when I have time”?
Yes, you.
That’s the real question.
Because when we talk about “the NHS”, we’re really talking about the people who make up the NHS…people like you and me.
And if we will dare to think differently, dare to look like a fool, dare to ask a silly question today in order to discover a brilliant answer tomorrow…then we will not only transform the NHS, but also the lives of generations to come.
Image: @hughmacleod
You can’t find these things in Africa
We had a lecture on Monogenetics this afternoon and looked at some genetic conditions present in Uganda. Conditions like:
- Thalassemia
- Sickle cell anaemia
- Haemophilia
- Tay Sachs Disease
- Huntington’s disease
The lecture was dragging a bit so I engaged the lecturer by asking some questions about how we could solve these problems forever.
And I asked what it would take to be able to do genetic screening on every newborn baby…as well as to do gene therapy on adults.
The question seemed to strike a nerve and the lecturer proceeded to detail how expensive the smallest possibility of doing this would be.
“Just one vial of primer for genotyping would cost $800…just to do part of the screening.”
And then after painting a doom and gloom picture, it culminated with the phrase:
“You can’t find these things in Africa.”
Henry Ford said: the person who thinks it can’t be done and the person who thinks it can are both right.
And all the breakthroughs in society are the result of a heretic daring to take someone’s ceiling as a floor for building the next discovery on.
I believe that many of the problems in Africa aren’t as impossible or hopeless as they’re made out to be.
The hopelessness narrative serves the purpose of generating sympathy (and donations) to fund the various NGOs on the ground.
But when you view them as simply problems to be solved, they’re no different from problems like:
- Making cars easily affordable at great scale (Henry Ford)
- Getting a heavier-than-air vehicle to fly without crashing (The Wright Brothers)
- Inventing a bulletproof vest (Stephanie Kwolek)
- Defining the theory of radioactivity (Marie Curie)
- Equality between blacks and whites in the USA (Martin Luther King Jr)
- Putting a computer on every desktop in the world (Bill Gates)
- Organising all the world’s information (Larry Page and Sergey Brin)
- Growing a baby outside of the body (Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards
Not to mention (in no order whatsoever): The Internet, overnight shipping, driverless cars, polio vaccine, seedless grapes, oral contraception, virtual reality glasses, the pancake…
All of these innovations – big and microcosmal – are simply successful attempts at developing problems to solutions.
And the problems in medicine aren’t the problems. But rather the Mindset that views them as “unsolvable”.
That’s one of the biggest issues I’ve found in my time dealing with medical schools over the last 18 years.
Students are trained to diagnose and manage rather than empowered and provoked to solve problems.
Management is an important part of solving the problem. But in practice, it becomes the end, rather than a means to support the end of completely solving the problem.
And when it comes to the so-called “that’s life in Africa” problems, this mindset of problem solving is a vital asset to cultivate.
So to make this practical…and not just a rant…my challenge is to outline some of the top high impact problems in healthcare…and see if I can articulate the solution that’s needed.
And if the solution is just “money”, then that’s another problem that is quite simple to solve.
Africa has the potential to be the healthiest, most prosperous and peaceful continent on the planet.
And an important step towards realising this potential is to ditch the “not in Africa” narrative when it comes to conceiving solutions.
All things are possible…especially in Africa.
Image: oecd.org