January 2023 - Lord Chris Smith
At the start of January this year our Corporate Fellows convened to decide a theme which would serve as the central force of gravity around which all our activities will revolve, from our blogs and our Virtual Roundtable, to some of the activities we undertake with our partners, and our William Pitt Seminar. For our January blog this year, The Master has kindly digitally inaugurated our theme for 2023 below.
The Future of Health
It is a real pleasure, again, to introduce this year’s theme for the Corporate Partnership Programme’s Blog Series: “The Future of Health”. There could be no more appropriate way to start off the new year. In 2021 I started off a first (and 25th anniversary) Corporate Partnership blog series on the theme of climate rescue. The nation at that time was in the midst of its third national lockdown, our students worked from their homes, and we were on the first of three prime ministers. Weeks where decades seemed to happen.
The beginning of Lent Term this year is thankfully very different: the bustle of student life has returned after the Christmas break, and already the familiar sounds of the city have renewed: oars dipping into the river before the sun has risen, bike bells ringing all along Pembroke Street during the 8:55am rush to 9am Lectures, and enthusiastic conversations take place in cloisters and corridors as friends reunite.
The pandemic has undergone a metamorphosis. Its perils and regulations were something which were ever present in our lives, and now it is to many something which seems rather distant, as if it were a brief black and white section of a Pathé newsreel.
And yet it hasn’t of course disappeared, and its repercussions are still being felt, and will likely still be felt for some time on our own health, and in the institutions, bureaucracies, and economies which make up our globalised world. Nothing has pushed so hard on an institution as the pandemic pushed on the NHS, except perhaps the last twelve years of austerity. The flagship of the United Kingdom lumbers on dutifully, though it now faces huge and growing challenges.
Can we (I believe firmly that we must) maintain the principle of a service free at the point of delivery? In the face of increasingly complex and expensive medical and drug technology, and an increasingly ageing population, can we continue to afford the standards of care and treatment we expect? Is it right for us to continue to treat everyone for everything? Can we do anything to address the growing disparity in health outcomes between the richest and the poorest in our society? Can we even contemplate the creation of a universal social care service, to sit alongside a universal health service?
These are all really difficult questions; and as old policy assumptions look to be further challenged in the coming months and years, ‘What is the Future of Health?’ seems an especially pertinent question. We have never been more aware of our own health and the present dangers to it, both on a personal level and on a national one, but now should also be a time for optimism, ambition, and hope.
Within the College there is a steady flow of incidental meetings and serendipitous encounters between our Fellowship and our Corporate Partners, and ideas are planted below the top soil that will brightly bloom come the spring with solutions to problems we may not even be aware of. This wealth of expertise is something which we hope to draw from continually throughout the year for our blog series, as we bring each composite part of personal and public health under a microscope for closer study in order to better understand what the future might hold in store.
Already things are happening in College which align with this theme by accident as they were planned well before the decision to focus on this question emerged, showing how prescient the theme The Future of Health is as we each independently arrive at the same questions. Back in November Labour’s Shadow Health & Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting was invited to speak to the Pembroke Politics Society, and in February Lord Simon Stevens, former Chief Executive of the NHS will be coming to Pembroke to speak to our students on “The Future of the NHS”.
The Future of Health is not just a concern within the political ecosystem at Westminster, the NHS, and across the broadsheets and tabloids of the British Press, but is also something being continually investigated within the University of Cambridge. In March the Cambridge Festival will be putting on over a hundred events about Health, looking at: the ethics of AI and medical ethics; a historic collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Bahir Dar in Ethiopia during the pandemic to create a low-cost Oxygen concentrator that works in low-resource clinical settings; the possible application of AI in Radiology; and health inequalities experienced by members of the LGBTQ+ community.
We hope, as with our past themes, that an open and frank conversation about the Future of Health will inspire our Corporate Partners and the broader College community, equipping them with the tools needed to make change within their respective sectors. No one person, organisation or government can secure a positive future for the health of all – but through the distribution of information and the sharing of ideas we can each make a difference to our own health, help to make a difference to the health of our communities, and encourage organisations and governments great and small to make practical and holistic decisions for a better future.
Chris Smith, January 2023
Lord Smith has been the Master of Pembroke since 2015, He is a former Culture Secretary and Chairman of the Environment Agency.