The British are Coming!

Directors from the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are visiting LifeSpring this week.  The visit is run by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and its purpose -- as you can imagine from the title -- is to help spur innovation, both for NHS and for its leadership.

After taking a tour of our newest hospital in Chilkalguda with our head of Clinical Quality, the LifeSpring/NHS team gets down to business.  A few colleagues and I make fun of "development tourism" -- well-meaning but surface trips to see social enterprises "in action" in developing countries.  This trip is far from that.  I am impressed by how genuinely the group wishes to learn LifeSpring's best practices for delivering quality care in resource-constrained environments and apply these to their own programs.

At the same time, LifeSpring identifies key challenges we're facing in the realm of clinical quality improvement, creating a quality-driven culture, staff engagement, and IT.  On the first day, we discuss these with the folks from NHS at a high-level.  It's clear the next day that they've done their homework, for they come back with lots of practical, applicable ideas.  Among these is a performance and quality scorecard for our hospitals, which blends not only the key indicators of quality, but efficiency and financial performance as well.

When I first moved to India, the underlying assumption of development seemed to be: "What can the West bring to developing countries, by way of resources, ideas, and best practices?"  Western consultants came to developing countries to advise social enterprises on exactly this, and there seemed to be a clear line between teacher and learner.

What's so exciting about working in Indian healthcare in general and LifeSpring in particular is the growing recognition that Indian healthcare has something to teach the West about how to do things efficiently and affordably.  High quality, affordability, and patient-centered care are clearly central to the debates happening in the US about healthcare now -- and it's what LifeSpring's entire model and mission is around.  

And more than that, there's such a focus here on *doing* rather than just talking and debating.  As someone from the NHS said: "What an incredible opportunity to be working on this now, in a country like India that's growing so quickly and with so much unmet need that LifeSpring can tap into and serve."  Cheers to that!