Healthcare think tank the King’s Fund has rebranded for the first time in 18 years and published a new five-year strategy, which aims to centre its staff.
Speaking to Civil Society, chief executive Sarah Woolnough said that the strategy and brand mark a shift in direction for the organisation, which seeks to “really go back to our charitable purpose”.
She said King’s Fund was “impatient for change and hungry for impact” and that she hopes the new strategy can “stretch the definition of what we mean by health and care”.
Woolnough, who joined the charity last year from Asthma+Lung UK, said the think tank, which was founded in 1897, “really needed a new strategy”.
New staff policies
In its strategy, King’s Fund said it aims to prioritise the voices of service users and staff as it bids to help the provision of more equitable healthcare services that suit peoples’ needs.
Woolnough said the charity would introduce new policies promoting more EDI training for King’s Fund staff on the subjects of disability, neurodiversity and socioeconomic background.
She said that there would be a greater focus on inclusive recruitment and improved website accessibility and that the charity would start to submit data about its staff’s backgrounds each year to the Social Mobility Employer Index in order to hold itself more accountable.
However, she also acknowledged that the charity, with its royal past, “probably needs to work quite hard” to make itself more appealing to an even more diverse pool of future employees.
Greater focus on new technologies
Woolnough also said the charity seeks to drive fundamental social care reforms” as well innovating for the years ahead by being what she described as more “future-focused and international-focused”.
This will include greater emphases on looking to examples of successful health and social care models elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world for sources of inspiration for what could work in the UK.
It will also include more extensive research into new technologies and data, and how they may benefit health and social care, she said.
Woolnough said that the charity has already been experimenting with AI in-house, and is currently exploring how it can support its workforce to further utilise the technology in support of the King’s Fund’s aims.
“We’re trying to give people space to play around with AI,” she said. “You need to embrace it – it’s so fundamental.”
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