I’m Lovin’ it: food for thought, is population health the way forward?

It was a ‘food for thought’ kind of week last week. Well actually I was thinking a lot about food, rather than doing too much thinking. I wasn’t thinking about food for myself, but many of the stories I read  had something about food in their content. And there were many of them. I will resist mentioning the development of carbon-free chickens, which in different ways are fed on insects instead of soya or corn. They are allegedly very tasty, and if you are interested in buying one for your Sunday lunch, have a look here. However, when I looked at their website yesterday, I noticed that the chickens (priced £28 each) were sold out.

My favourite food story, however, was about how folk have fallen out of love with the humble sandwich during the pandemic. If you missed it, you can read it here. I thought it was both an amusing and informative story. Mind you it was a little hard to swallow the fact that each of us consumes 200 sandwiches every year. Apparently, in May this year, folk voted the bacon butty as the UK’s favourite sandwich, although I don’t recall anyone asking me.

However, the most obvious food story last week was the so-called ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ or ‘Rishi’s Dishes’ as they are known around here. People can get up to £10 off each meal they buy. They can do this time and time again. The scheme’s so-called purpose is to get the hospitality industry working again by encouraging people to eat out. Takeaways are not included (there is always a silver lining to every dark cloud). Now let me make it really clear, I have not and will not be taking advantage of this new scheme. It’s not that I don’t care about the economy; of course I do. As my mother is often minded to say: ‘there is no such thing as a free meal’. Rishi’s Dishes will of course, have to be paid for by the UK taxpayer. That said, (and I will come back to this point later), I care more about my health and wellbeing than I do about eating out in these uncertain times.  

I’m not alone in this thinking. The ‘Financial Times’ last week reported that since July’s reopening, older customers are the least likely to want to dine in. For me it’s not the risks of coming across someone Covid positive but asymptomatic, but the whole ambience and feel of the place. Whoever is manufacturing Perspex and clear plastic sheets must be making a fortune. But the use of them in places like pubs and restaurants makes me feel we have successfully put the ‘hospital’ into many hospitality experiences, and to be honest, I have enough of the former in my day job!

Likewise, I for one, don’t think that putting ‘hospitals’ at the forefront of how we restore normal health care is necessarily a good thing. And I don’t mean that hospitals are not important nor needed. Of course, they are, but we can also think differently about their place in a future NHS. Last week I was part of a conversation that enabled me to watch and listen to Mervyn King talk about his career. I’m talking about the South African Mervyn King, not the former Governor of the Bank of England. He is famous for the reports he published on corporate governance, and how his work shifted the ‘governance paradigm’ across the world. Now you may think his work has little to do with either food or the repositioning of normality, including what future healthcare provision might look like, but I think you may be wrong. His work has literally influenced and changed the way organisations discharge their governance responsibilities. These organisations range from small companies through to international conglomerates and even global institutions such as the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.

I will come back to that in just a moment, but first Mervyn King and food. Between 1981 – 1989 he was the first Chairman of Operation Hunger. This was an organisation started a little earlier in 1978 by Dr Selma Browde and Dr Nthato Motlana in response to their having witnessed the impact of malnutrition on the South African population and its economy. By 1992, Operation Hunger was feeding up to 2 million people a day! Their work still continues to this day. Using proven methods of community engagement and empowerment, they have built an effective social and physical infrastructure that provides their staff with access to vulnerable people. They continue to work with local communities to create healthy environments for development and growth. You can read more on their work here, but in short, they take a population approach to improving the health and wellbeing of individuals and the communities people live in.  

Which in an interesting way links back to what Mervyn King is better known for. In 1994 he published what has now become the foundation for an immense body of work about corporate governance. This was the King Report 1. It was based on a very different premise of the purpose of an organisation’s Board of Directors. Up to that point, the perceived wisdom stated that a Board’s function was to maximise the benefits for the company’s shareholders. Indeed, it is what I was taught by my MBA tutors. He turned this notion upon its head and thought that in future Boards should learn and better understand what was in the best interests of all their stakeholders and what the organisation might do to enhance the stakeholders’ long-term interests.

This still resonates with contemporary management and governance. Indeed, King went on to refine his original report 3 times, the last of which ‘King 4’ contains 16 principles that might be applied to any organisation wishing to improve how they demonstrate their value to, and understanding of, those who use their goods and/or services. You can read ‘King 4’ here. Interestingly, it was published in 2016, the same year that NHS England published its plans for Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs), which were the forerunner of the emergent Integrated Care Systems (ICS). And here is some more food for thought. My hope that those involved in developing ICS read and properly digest what ‘King 4’ has to offer. If they do, there is every chance that we might avoid simply ‘reshuffling’ the old health guard and really get to grips with improving the health of our communities.