Chief Executive’s Blog March 2012
It’s hard to share learning across borders, as we found out when we held our first international conference.
Thames Valley HIEC was privileged to be joined by 16 very senior members of staff from the Brazilian public sector health service at our recent conference on greener healthcare: 90% less – why greener healthcare is leaner healthcare. You will find a review of the event and copies of the presentations on our website.
We had much to share and much in common, but the time passed too fast as we struggled with the barriers of language and simultaneous translation. To give full justice to the seniority of our guests, and the wealth of knowledge they brought with them, we would have needed a week together at least. Their feedback to us at the end of the day was that they are doing everything that we do, somewhere within their system, but their big take home point was to try to emulate the UK’s attitude to data. The advantage of a single system with (relatively) similar means of data collection may be overlooked by us; but was clear to them, struggling as they are with a large private healthcare sector and a lot of different, autonomous states.
It was less clear what we learnt from them. So the lesson for the HIEC in future will be to try to involve our international guests at a much earlier stage in the planning of the event; to build in far more time for discussion to allow for translation; and for all presenters to rely more on visual than word-based presentations.
If you would like to know more about our Brazilian guests, or to contact them directly for further information, please click on the link below:
Exchange UK-Brazil on Sustainable Hospitals