If you Google Leana Wen, you will find that she’s got the kind of biography that makes a person feel intimidated and inferior. She is an award-winning author and columnist, a professor of public health and an emergency physician. A truly amazing resume.
I first came across her work a few years ago and was really struck by a quote she made. It isn’t short; if you asked me to repeat it on the spot, I’d get the general thrust of it but would fall short of replicating it verbatim.
It’s a phrase that I think very few would disagree with: ‘Public health depends on winning over hearts and minds. It’s not enough just to have good policy, you have to convince people to actually follow it.’
To convince is to cause someone to believe firmly in the truth of something. Our job, in many ways, is to be ‘convincers’, showing people the right path and using our skills as professionals and communicators to connect with them in such a way that they engage and follow it.
People are highly variable and nuanced. We must find the right tool, the right message to help them to help themselves. It can be incredibly frustrating when it doesn’t happen, but the key is to never give up, not to dwell on the perceived failures. It can feel like banging your head against a brick wall.
Getting back to the quote from Leana Wen, a key word of course is ‘policy’, and we simply don’t have policy enacted consistently throughout the whole of the UK. We all know that community optometry is the answer to so many of the issues faced by our population, but the message hasn’t been getting through, most notably so in England.
There are some wonderful innovations in the devolved nations (most recently Wales) in terms of optometry advancement, but, as overall policy goes, England seems to be a good step behind.
Many who saw the Eye Health Strategy Bill for England, championed by Marsha de Cordova, MP for Battersea, as a great hope, were disappointed in July this year when it became clear that it wouldn’t have its planned second reading.
While this was a setback, more a quirk of parliamentary timing, the fact it was presented at all is significant progress; we have not seen such a bill for many years.
We hope the bill will be reintroduced at some point, doubtless sharpened and modified. In the meantime, we can all play a role in educating our patients, developing ourselves and stepping outside our comfort zones. If we truly want to see changes in the health economy to benefit our great profession, then what can we do to enable that?
I’m really interested to see how the sector bodies step up to make the most of this opportunity. Will local optical committees (LOCs), for example, use their funding to develop the right narrative and engage the right kind of support at a local level? Surely it is time for everyone to pull in the same direction.
We could all do more with opportunities like National Eye Health Week and World Sight Day, but we needn’t wait for these calendar markers to share our message. Every patient we see is an opportunity to convince and educate to make an ambassador. Pharmacists have done a brilliant job of this over the years.
We all know there is lots of competition for vital, dwindling NHS funds. You don’t need me to tell you that the NHS is in multifaceted crisis due to a convergence of systemic, demographic and financial challenges. Increasing demand, an ageing population, and the burden of chronic diseases that strain resources are leading to longer wait times and reduced service quality.
As the news has recently highlighted, the very buildings of our social infrastructure are in peril. The well-publicised problems associated with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) alongside chronic underfunding, has left hospitals and healthcare facilities stretched to their limits.
The government hasn’t got the resources to fix everything, or even to invest for the future, without huge reassurance that the payoff will be enough. There simply isn’t the cashflow to improve services without that ‘convincing’ step. Every penny must be fought for and justified.
What will you do differently to make a difference? Change the way you communicate with patients? Try to influence your locally elected representatives? Stand for election at your LOC or regional optical committee, College council or Association of Optometrists council?
There are loads of options. As for me, a boy from a South Wales coalfield, I’ve done something I’ve never thought I would. I have attended both the Conservative and Labour party conferences with some like-minded colleagues to try to spread the word about the potential of our sector, because I feel so strongly that we are part of the solution to the NHS crisis.
Like Leana Wen, I want to be a ‘convincer’.
- Paul Morris is director of professional advancement at Specsavers UK & Ireland.
