It is important to recognise that there are two related issues one is to encourage people to challenge conventional thinking and produce new innovative solutions, the other is to enable the organization and people with whom we work to adopt new ways of thinking and behaving.
This is a group including myself and my Australian friend Professor Gill Palmer discussing health innovations and reforms before an audience of 1,000 health leaders in Shanghai. I later returned to Beijing with a WHO team and my friend Dr David Kwo to help establish a system for monitoring the progress and effectiveness of reforms across the many provinces and regions of China and globally.
Lord Michael Young, who wrote the 1945 Labour Party Manifesto, setting out the case for the NHS, was the most creative social thinker I ever met. He was a social entrepreneur who established many organizations in the UK Australia and in other parts of the world. He established the College of Health to empower patients with knowledge and questions about their conditions and needs. At one stage it served as an advice centre for 11.5 million people mostly in London and the South East. I served as Chair of the organization as a result of working with them to develop the national strategy for NHS Direct and it was a great priviledge to get to know him a little. We developed an idea for a community health TV channel for Hull, an area he knew well and where the technology would make it possible to personalise services to deliver health and wellbeing information. During his last stay in hospital at the age of 85 he sent two notes - one suggested investment in language skills for hospital cleaning staff so they could talk to patients. The other proposed that discharge interviews should be tape recorded so that the information could be made available online to patients and carers as he found that it was difficult to remember what had been said.