The MindFields College Blog

In The Times on Tuesday doctors, nurses and other employees of the NHS gave their views on what should be done to improve the healthcare system.

A Gynaecologist stated: “The service has changed out of all recognition over the past five years because of a dominating centralisation by administrators and managers who have no real understanding of medical care, and no respect for the professionals who provide it.

The major point that they fail to understand is that for patients, and for healthcare professionals, in addition to the quality of care, an important factor is the quality of the experience of that care. There is a target-driven culture now, and although clinical outcomes do improve in areas such as cardiology and cancer, the improvement is less than that which would have been achieved by medical advance and breakthroughs over the same time period.”

He suggested a solution to these problems to be, “An independent health board to run the NHS, rather as the Bank of England has been given authority over inflation and interest rates. A recognition that advice from professionals is more important than soundbites from politicians. A return to the Royal Colleges of the responsibility for standards and career structure.”*

As the book An Idea in Practice** explained, before discussing or implementing changes to an existing system to make it more effective, you have to be clear about what a good system actually entails. Clearly the NHS currently isn’t an effective system, but how does a really efficient and effective system work? And why do systems like the NHS fall apart when they are centralised and micromanaged?

Nature provides examples in abundance of amazingly complex systems that work perfectly. Let’s look at the simplest life form that can exist independently, a cell, and see if we can get some tips…

Each cell is actually an amalgamation of three independent entities that work together: the cell membrane, the nucleus, and between the two, the cytoplasm. They each bring an independent ability to the party to maintain the whole. The principle of having specialised entities cooperating with others like this generated the evolution and increasing complexity of all living organisms, from unicellular creatures like bacteria, to animals like us; you contain about 100 trillion individual cells!

To make creatures that were more complicated than unicellular ones, Nature hit upon a plan – to follow the same pattern! That is to say, complex creatures should also be made up of separate organs, just like a cell is, each with a semi-autonomous function such as the skin, brain, heart, kidney or liver. All of the systems interact with one another just enough to keep an organism healthy; they are all interconnected and dependent on one another. The nervous system controls various organs of the body directly. The brain also receives information from many organs of the body and adjusts signals to these organs to keep them functioning well. A delicate but vital and strong balance is maintained.

What characterises all of the organs is that each one has its own field of expertise; an ability that no other part of the overall organism has. Because it has this specialised knowledge it is allowed to get on with its job. The heart doesn’t tell the kidney what to do, the kidney doesn’t tell the liver what to do, and the various organs that make up the brain have no idea what’s going on unless something starts to go wrong. Each organ pursues its own special function. But they do all communicate with each other via various channels – and it is through cooperation that they maintain the integrity of the organism.

Of course, a kidney or a heart might become unsound. Nowadays when that happens we can bring in an outside expert to transplant a new one. But he would not then tell the patient to consciously control it. As soon as a new kidney or heart is in place you have to allow it to get on with its job. So the way Nature works is to delegate responsibility, to allow expertise to develop within an organ and not to interfere or inhibit that expertise from flourishing. The brain simply builds systems of cooperation and feedback into each organism.

Human groupings – brains coming together to cooperate – are living organisms yet we continually forget this. We are the result of natural laws and when we stray from what nature has proved works, we tend to create complexity and unnecessary problems for ourselves. We can illustrate this by considering a collection of individual brains gathered together in a building to provide medical services: a hospital. Like any organ of the body it serves – the body is the surrounding community – a hospital has a distinct function (as does a school, railway system, police force, a business, and any number of other groupings of people with specialist knowledge and skills). As such it should be allowed to carry out its function with minimum interference. Clearly this is not happening. The state, our government, exists to act as the brain and think strategically about how to keep the body politic safe. To do this well it needs to function in the way any natural system does: by allowing all of the organisations and individuals that make up the country to get on with their various jobs and roles without any unnatural interference. Whenever an individual area of expertise is functioning properly it is because it is left alone to use its specialist knowledge to do so, something no other organ, including central government, can do.

Whenever a government department steps outside its area of responsibility and tries to micromanage people, it causes chaotic effects because so many of its actions are irrelevant to what is needed. This has the effect of reducing great swathes of the population to a state of learned helplessness, unable to get on with real work. This way of running things is not natural: The brain cannot control how the kidney does its job.

Modern society needs to understand this concept: If the brain tries to control the organs of the body, the body will die. Government should not micromanage the country not because of any ideological objection but simply because it goes against the laws of Nature to let it do so. Nature does not expect the higher intelligence system of a creature to be aware of how the kidney or liver functions moment by moment. On a day-to-day basis it ignores them, expecting them to function without intervention. It is only if there is a malfunction that conscious attention is addressed to the problem, and even then the higher intelligence doesn’t directly control the kidney, it finds out what has gone wrong with it and creates the conditions for the kidney to function autonomously again. It doesn’t destroy the kidney nor does it try to control it from the brain. It clearly doesn’t have the expertise to be a kidney. The brain doesn’t have a clue as to how the kidney performs its function. The relationship with the brain and the organs of the body closely parallels the relationship between the government and the various groups at work in society that help make it function.

*Source

** Read more about An Idea in Practice: Using the Human Givens Approach
Posted by: Eleanor