'Nakamura invented the light bulb'

Would Nakamura invented the light bulb if he was working in the NHS?

Nakamura invented the light bulb, that is what we might probably say one day, that Nakamura invented the light bulb or to put it correctly that Nakamura re-invented the light bulb. Shuji Nakamura's inspiring story has been told before but here is an ultra-short version of it

Nakamura gets a masters from a relatively small university in a small city in Japan, goes off to work in a small company in a lab competes against the big companies, discovers many right things and makes products that would not sell.

Times get difficult, his department shrinks. He goes to his boss and wants to make a product that the big boys have tried to make and failed; with his record, he gets turned down. He goes to his boss's boss and gets some support to make it, despite his record of making nothing that sold, his company chairman gives him money, $2mil actually and he reinvents the light bulb. Well, he actually gets the blue component of the LED to work and the rest is history.

What is interesting is that Nakamura was a non-PhD working in the industry as a lab scientist who then gets a doctorate from his local university and within 5 years is head hunted by University of California and becomes a professor.

Nakamuras in NHS?

Let us imagine a scenario of a doctor who becomes a consultant in a DGH in the NHS and wants to do something that the big boys tried and failed.Then the DGH consultant fails as well, fails repeatedly - what are the chances that he will not be performance managed out of his/her activity and driven to the end of his wits.

What are the chances that the medical director or CD will be over-ruled by the CEO or Chairman and a doctor provided funding to carry on despite a record of 'failure'? What are the chances that even after this doctor discovered something interesting a big place will head hunt and make him/her an 'academic'? In fact he/she should be grateful if the GMC and the rest of the regulation did not land on him/her and crushed him/her out of existence.

Getting real

Now a lot of you are going to say that reinventing a light bulb while surely profound is unlikely to involve any damage to real human beings. You might say that any lurking Nakamuras in the NHS if supported could end up hurting patients. Good logical argument. Is that what is really hurting patients? Probably not. It is not any innovation by enthusiastic people that harms patients, it is the bureaucratic nay sayers who use the language of clinical governance and risk yet know very little about process capabilities, refuse to learn shared baselines, practice unimaginatively poor leadership who perpetuate harm in healthcare. They refuse to fix the system instead try to 'fix' the people in the system. Of course the medical profession does not do itself any favours by its ego, jealousy and macho attitude which will aim to shoot down anything that arises outside its hierarchical constraints by treating them as bad apples and recommending the use of evidence the origins of which  can probably attributed to the Abilene paradox.

In healthcare especially in the NHS it is pretty much impossible these days to take an extra breath without CD, CG, R&D, GCP, LREC, NREC, NICE, and every other alphabet in the soup wanting to spoil it for you, while claiming to support you. It is when people who are typically NHS managers and every other hierarchical bureaucrat stops behaving like researchers and most doctors who are not researchers begin to look at operational evidence as a valid method of creating a new practices, innovation and improvement that healthcare will be truly successful.

Allowing and managing 'Nakamuras' in healthcare is not easy but will be rewarding; eliminating the healthcare 'Nakamuras' will allow the managers to sleep peacefully but might push true healthcare innovation into a coma.

If you know of any 'Nakamuras' in the NHS please let me know by leaving a comment below.

©M HEMADRI 

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Links & reference
The dream of the blue laser diode
http://engphys.mcmaster.ca/undergraduate/outlines/4e03/Nichia%20%27s%20Shuji%20Nakamura%20Dream%20of%20the%20Blue%20Laser%20Diode.htm
Time magazine short feature on Nakamura
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1604891,00.html