Groupthink
Co-locate Velindre blogged last week about how decision making by the New Velindre leaders showed disturbing traits typical of groupthink.
https://colocate-velindre.co.uk/is-the-new-velindre-team-hopelessly-out-of-touch-part-2/
https://colocate-velindre.co.uk/is-the-new-velindre-team-incurably-out-of-touch/
We weren’t to know that only days later a Westminster report on the handling of COVID 19 would tell us that here too the Government’s approach ….was not challenged enough by ministers in any part of the UK, indicating a “degree of groupthink” https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58876089).
How does this fit with the New Velindre leadership?
The traits are the same here as with the process associated with the leaders of New Velindre. Groupthink: ‘the uncritical acceptance of a majority view’ is real. It happens, the people involved often don’t recognise it, and it does real harm.
The MPs report also shows that groupthink’s tentacles can spread right through political and other institutions , where ignorance of the subject presents no obstacle. But the case of New Velindre, serving all of South East Wales, differs in one important respect from the Westminster blunder. The New Velindre programme, though endorsed by the now First Minister, was strongly confronted by the science. It still is- even more strongly. The wider clinical community questioned it as soon as the programme’s real nature got out. And it continues so to challenge.
The extent of the groupthink mentality
The spread of New Velindre groupthink has so far had the audacity to ignore 163 senior Welsh clinicians in cancer, best practice in the rest of Wales and the UK, and the magisterial letter from the External Advisory Board of eminent specialists. https://colocate-velindre.co.uk/the-disturbing-letter/
This is what groupthink does. Best science, best cancer care, best expenditure of a cancer budget, best information? All of these must bow to conformity, political obtuseness and naked power.
Where does it end?
What will happen if this continues? We can answer that…. Just look at the Grange Hospital and the Ambulance Service. Groupthink won through there as well.
