Love is an essential part of healthcare. The National Health Service needs be managed with love and compassion to build trust in the services it provides. As any organisation providing a service needs to do it from a place of love. Yet, despite its mission to improve the health and wellbeing of society, fear, stress, and anxiety often dominate the atmosphere for both staff and patients. This is largely because the current system puts processes and targets above people.
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The NHS: A Factory or a Service?
Many NHS managers believe that good management is about efficiency, making the right decisions, and directing staff on what to do. They envision the NHS as a well oiled machine that must operate perfectly, where everything is ordered, resources are used efficiently, and outcomes are predictable. In their world clinical excellence is providing an intervention as quickly and effortessly as possible.
Healthcare as a Standardised Service
To achieve this, rules are set, targets and KPIs are established, and standardised processes are enforced. While these are essential for maintaining some level of structure, they come at a cost: they turn a complex service into something resembling a production line. It has been described by Andy Wilkins as sausage machine thinking.
But Patients Are Not Widgets.
The reality is that the NHS is not a factory producing standard products. It’s a service that supports people’s health and wellbeing. Patients are not units to be processed; they are individuals with unique needs, emotions, and circumstances. There is no such thing as an “average patient.”
Healthcare Through Fear.
This mismatch between the idealised, mechanical view of the NHS and the reality of patient care leads to frustration, anger, and blame when reality doesn’t fit the model. What starts as a desire to help people ends up creating an environment of fear and hostility. This is because when rules have to be strictly enforced, managers resort to dictating what should and shouldn’t happen, rather than adapting to real-world complexities.
The Consequences of a Lack of Love in Healthcare
This rigidity has far-reaching consequences for both staff and patients. Clinicians under pressure from their managers often internalise the stress and inadvertently pass it on to patients. When clinicians are expected to hit targets rather than connect with people, they may begin to see patients as numbers or problems to be solved as quickly as possible.
The true value of the NHS lies not just in the procedures it performs, but in the interactions between patients and healthcare professionals. It is not just ‘The NHS, it is ‘Our NHS’. It’s about listening to and addressing people’s fears, adapting to their needs, and providing personalised care. As I’ve discussed in a previous post. When this aspect of healthcare is neglected, it creates what systems thinker John Seddon calls “failure demand,” where patients come back into the system repeatedly because their real needs were not met the first time.
Love and Compassion: The True Measure of Success
For the NHS to create real value for its patients, it needs to operate from a place of love, compassion, and empathy. It may sound idealistic, but healthcare is inherently a caring profession. When pressurised managers communicate fear, stress, and anxiety, it trickles down to clinicians, who in turn pass it on to patients. This cycle needs to be broken.
A systematic review in the BMJ found that healthcare staff wellbeing is directly linked to patient satisfaction. Stress and burnout among staff can decrease patient satisfaction and increase incidents of negative patient interactions. This supports the argument that fostering a culture of compassion and love within healthcare management can lead to better staff mental health and consequently, improved patient care.
Breaking the Cycle of Fear and Anxiety
To break the cycle of unhappy staff resulting in happy patients the solution is to shift the focus from rigid targets and process adherence to the quality of patient interactions. Instead of a culture of “should” and “shouldn’t,” the NHS needs a language of “better” or “worse,” where the goal is continuous improvement, learning, and adapting.
A successful NHS should support not just the health and wellbeing of its patients but also of its staff. This can only be achieved through fostering a compassionate environment where everyone feels listened to, understood, and valued.
The Results of Love in Healthcare
Compassionate care has been shown to significantly improve patient outcomes, such as lower anxiety levels, reduced pain perception, and higher satisfaction rates. A study published in the Journal of Compassionate Healthcare (Sinclair, S., et al. (2016)) highlights how empathy and compassion in care can lead to faster recovery times and reduced hospital stays. This suggests that integrating love and compassion into healthcare management can result in measurable benefits for patients.
Whilst a report by The King’s Fund, “A Compassionate Leadership for Compassionate Healthcare,” states that shifting the focus from compliance to compassionate care can lead to a significant positive change in organisational culture, resulting in better outcomes for both patients and staff.
The Way Forward: Embracing Complexity and Humanity
Many complaints about the NHS today revolve around a lack of listening, understanding, and compassion, with many people describe as a climate of fear and bullying. This isn’t due to inefficiency, but is a result of putting processes and targets above adapting to the needs of the people it serves.
The NHS must move away from outdated industrial thinking and embrace its role as a provider of complex, human-centred services. It’s about acknowledging the diversity of patients and responding to their unique needs, rather than enforcing rigid standards that don’t adapt to people’s needs.
Support and Empathy Are The Best Way To Manage in Healthcare.
A study published in Healthcare Management Review found that a supportive and empathetic management approach leads to a better work environment, reduced staff turnover, and higher overall job satisfaction. Implementing love-based management could reduce the turnover of healthcare professionals, which is a significant issue in the NHS due to high levels of burnout and stress.
The success of the NHS should therefore not be measured solely by how efficiently it uses its resources but by how well it supports the health and wellbeing of the population and its own staff. A healthy organisation is one that thrives on love, compassion, and empathy: values that cannot be quantified, but are essential for true healthcare.
New Plans for The NHS
As the NHS has been described as broken, new plans are being produced to fix it. If you would like to read more about whether a new plan can fix the NHS please check out my post here.
Conclusion
For the NHS to truly fulfil its purpose, it needs to lead with love and compassion. This means rethinking management philosophies, reshaping organisational culture, and prioritising patient and staff wellbeing over rigid targets and impersonal processes.
Only by doing so can the NHS become the service it aspires to be—a service that not only treats illness but also heals and supports people in the fullest sense of the word. In the end, love is not just a sentiment; it’s a necessity for the health of our healthcare system. 💓
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