The analysts' manifesto
By chrisbeeley
I was at an event a little while ago and there was talk of change coming for healthcare analysts. With the advent of population health management we were going to finally get the recognition we as a profession deserve and would get the training and tools necessary to deliver the improvements we all know that data can give.
I put my hand up and said, in essence, we’ve heard it all before and I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m tired, frankly, of reading policy documents that lay out all these amazing new ways of working that just never happen because we’re not given the time and space by senior management and have to spend our time running around sending all this pointless data to all these different bodies that a lot of the time seem to just throw the data on the pile and then forget about it.
To the speaker’s great credit, they accepted my challenge and I spoke to them later on. We agreed that we would work on a manifesto for healthcare analysts, with me gathering submissions from the analytical community and coordinating it into a document.
This is the first draft. I invite anyone and everyone to criticise, challenge, build on, edit, rewrite, whatever, what is here. This is nowhere near the final version but I thought I would get it out there now and see if anybody has any reactions. I’ve been working with several other analysts so it’s not all me but the writing is and you can blame me for the strident tone.
There’ll be more of this in the months to come, we’re going to take it out on the road, so to speak, and in particular I want leaders to see it. Too often this stuff is handed round healthcare analysts at the coalface who already know this stuff. I want our leaders to know what we need and what we can do, and this is the first step.