Building a connected and sustainable health system

Sciana Fellow Adrian Jonas reflects on leadership, his Sciana experience to date, and his hopes for the future

Adrian Jonas is the chief analyst for the Northwest Region in NHS England. His role covers a population of just under seven and a half million people, a workforce of well over 200,000 in the National Health Service. He is also the senior responsible officer for developing a secure data environment at that regional level to improve access to data for research and industry to help make promising treatments available sooner. Before joining the NHS, he spent three years leading data and analytics at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). He is a member of Sciana's fifth cohort.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Sciana Network: What comes to mind when you think about your experience in the Sciana Network? 

Adrian Jonas: My [experience] in the programme is tremendously positive. To be able to step away from the operational issues of the day job and focus on some big strategic issues with diversity of thought from leaders. It's very different in Germany and Switzerland to how the NHS operates here in the UK, but at the same time, [there are] similar problems around workforce and financial challenges. I think that networking and the ability to apply that diversity shouldn't be underestimated. 

SN: Part of the Network's mission is to equip the leaders who are in health care to tackle future challenges. Could you provide examples of what you've learned about leadership while participating in this programme? 

AJ: On this programme, particularly the first residential part, I found it important to reflect afterwards and learn about myself. As someone who's a natural introvert, I have quickly become more forthcoming with ideas [and] concepts, contributing proactively, and had the respect of some of the people around me. I think what I've learned about leadership in the programme is how important behaviours are. It's okay to accept being an incomplete leader, but complete teams are crucial. With the diversity we have in the programme, you see how we've learnt to shed our armour as we come into the Schloss and then work together on some problems. That is very complimentary. I am also mentoring a fantastic young professional on the Public Policy New Voices Europe Fellowship; it is fantastic to help them develop as a future leader.

SN: Your cohort Sciana Challenge this year is building a connected and sustainable health ecosystem. What does this challenge mean to you, and could you share more details about what your working group has been investigating?

AJ: For my group specifically, we're focusing on how we will build a connected and sustainable future fit workforce based on the One Health principles and approaches. In a short amount of time, we've made fantastic progress in interviewing One Health experts from across the globe with different sets of professional experiences. We've quickly found that there [are] a lot of variances in the definition of One Health. 

We're now digesting and synthesising the evidence from those interviews before considering a wider survey to dig a bit deeper and understand 'What does the workforce need to look like in the future?' I'm really looking forward to that. We've made great progress, but we're still very much about 20 to 30 per cent to go. We hope to have at the end of our research a paper that we'll submit to a journal and build some podcasts to ensure we have something that will be extremely useful for planning and the future workforce globally. 

What we identified very early on is that the demands on the health and care workforce, completely outstripping supply, is a global challenge. In the future, [there] will not be enough clinicians, nurses, or professionals. And it's not just replacing people with technology; it's about the interface of technology with the workforce and patients. 

SN: What are you hoping to achieve with the time spent with the Sciana Network? 

AJ: We hope to have completed most of this One Health future workforce project. I think the alliances and friendships that we've established will be tremendously useful for the rest of my career in health and social care. And I do believe there is a responsibility for me and of us all, in terms of making those links for what we are working [on] that will, in time, be embedded in national policy and operationally to ensure we enable a shift from focusing on treatment in acute settings to wellbeing and prevention.