DISCONNECT. A word that our policymakers are hearing more and more. This week, we heard that a third of all investigations into child abuse are ineffective and lessons are neither passed on nor learned.
At the same time, another report suggests that every pound invested in mental health avoidance sees a 37p saving in annual health costs, so that after three years the initiative has paid for itself.
What are these miraculous interventions? Er, better diet and health diagnosis. If you have a bad back you might get depressed, and vice versa. Simplistically obvious? No wonder Chinese doctors opted to make their living by preventing illness, rather than trying to cure it.
So why do we more often reach for cure and control rather than prevention? Never seem to learn lessons? Because, actually, it’s almost impossible. Because of disconnect. The folk running the inquiries are not the folk running the services and they are not the folk prioritising resources who are not the folk allocating resources who are not, in turn, the folk deciding how resources should be deployed.
The chain of communication, command and/or supply is too long. And a one-way street. Top down. The folk deciding policy are too far from the folk asked to deliver. Therefore, no real dialogue ever develops.
Listening to a radio debate about the child abuse inquiries, the argument was put, as usual, that it was unfair to criticise people who had “not met targets that had not been previously set”. Doesn’t this sound a bit like saying they didn’t think they should double-check potentially vulnerable children because, er, they weren’t asked to? Disconnect.
A bit like certain MPs complaining it is unfair that they should be asked to pay back expenses claims that many people feel were outrageous. Proving that they still don’t “get it”? They are being vilified for being arrogant or plain daft, not for what most people would call “playing the system”. Disconnect.
Too often, we see disconnect in short-term multi-million, multi-agency initiatives run by nice suits who have their heads and gold-plated pensions in the right place, while most of the people whom many of the initiatives are aimed at helping, would probably prefer more long-term support in the shape of a few quid here and there to neighbourhood groups who have their hearts in the right place and wear cool jeans and hoodies.
Perhaps there is hope. As we run out of cash, the pennies, quite literally, will start to drop. In the words of Churchill, we need expertise “on tap, not on top”.
I’ve asked this before, but, isn’t it now time to focus on how we break down the distant, monolithic, command and control mindset and get real decisions and real resources into real communities? How we overcome the disconnect?
