UHS update - Humanity First Healthcare

Hello Marsha and Sheila, welcome to this UHS Champions update!

Below is a podcast that provides an audio summary and below is a written narrative.

This covers an update on UHS progress and a headline review of UK healthcare, as this provides a timely and helpful comparison for UHS.

PS It's titled Humanity First Healthcare, as this is term we have started to use to define Champions applied into healthcare settings.

With all good wishes, Glen and Steve!

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UHS Champions Update - September 2026
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Humanity First Healthcare · UK Review by Champions

Highlights for Union Health Service

September 22, 2026
The essence

When a health organisation treats people as people, patients and staff thrive — and performance follows.

It is built from small things done well: tasks owned, voices heard, every person treated with respect. UHS has spent fifteen months demonstrating a commitment to place patients at the heart of everything it does, and now has the chance to make that the way it works every day.

The summary below is an illustration of the outcomes when things go wrong, and the potential when they go right.

In this summary
  1. UHS and the NHS: a shared founding story
  2. Three lessons from the UK: two warnings, and proof it can be turned round
  3. In one simple word: accountability
  4. Why small things matter
  5. UHS Champions Journey: progress to date
  6. The way forward: accountability, with support
  7. The opportunity: fix the roof while the sun is shining
  8. The next phase: three areas of focus
A mirror

UHS and the NHS

The scale could hardly be more different, but the story is strikingly similar. The NHS — the UK's National Health Service, founded in 1948 — employs well over a million people; UHS around 250. Yet both were founded by visionaries so that working people could get comprehensive care without worrying about the bill.

The NHS began on July 5, 1948. Aneurin Bevan, a miner's son from Tredegar in South Wales, took the model his home town had established in 1890, where miners paid into their own medical aid society, supporting around 20,000 people by the mid-1920s. This was adopted into the NHS, now supporting over 60 million people.

UHS opened its first clinic in 1955, conceived by the leaders of the Chicago janitors' union, so that low-paid janitors — most of them Polish immigrant women — could have prepaid, comprehensive care with no deductibles. Today, it supports around 40,000 members who would otherwise struggle to access healthcare.

Each had a founding figure who personified it. For the NHS it was Bevan. As a young man, in 1925, he held his father as he died, as he later recalled, of pneumoconiosis, a coal-dust lung disease for which the family received no compensation. Born from the strong community spirit of the mining valleys that typified South Wales, he channelled his sense of injustice into creating the NHS some 20 years later.

For UHS it was Dr Angelo Creticos.

The question for both is similar: how to hard-wire this founding spirit, these values, into the fabric of the organization?

But first, we need to understand why this is important.

Three lessons from the UK

Two warnings, and proof it can be turned round

Chester The organisation stopped listening Between June 2015 and June 2016 a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital murdered seven babies and tried to murder seven more.1 When consultants raised the alarm, the hospital's leaders drew up a plan to “manage out” the doctors. The public inquiry, reporting on September 15, 2026, found “a profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding”. Years later, with new leaders in post, four of them ran a covert campaign against the new chief executive who had raised a whistleblowing complaint. New people, same behaviour: the failure was in the system, not only a few bad apples.
County Durham Warnings ignored, patients harmed Of 514 breast-surgery patients reviewed so far, 315 (61%) were harmed, 77 of them significantly.
Manchester From failing to outstanding, by putting people first In 2014 inspectors judged Manchester's children's services inadequate on every leadership measure: 486 cases were waiting for assessment and some social workers held 40 to 50 cases each. A new director arrived in 2016 with a simple vision — “Our Manchester, our children”. The council recruited 40% more frontline social workers, cleared the backlog and kept the same people around the same children. By November 2025 the service was rated outstanding, under the same funding pressure as every other council, and inspectors wrote: “Social workers talk about children with warmth and kindness.”

The common thread is not skill or money. It is concerns raised and not acted on, tasks nobody owns, and people who speak up being treated as the problem. Where this works well, patients and staff are the beneficiaries, a true win-win.

The heart of it

In one simple word: accountability.

And the cost of failure is huge.

Where nobody owns the problem, patients are harmed and good people give up. Where everyone owns their part, a service can turn itself round — as Manchester did. That is the choice at the centre of this summary.

Why small things matter
Rudeness is a performance problemIn controlled experiments, people who were belittled before a task performed about a third worse; people who only witnessed it did 22–28% worse. Neonatal intensive care teams exposed to mild rudeness made poorer diagnoses and shared less information.
People treat others the way they are treatedStaff who feel unheard and unsupported protect themselves: heads down, do the job, go home. Patients feel it first — in a hurried word, a phone left ringing, a question nobody answers.
Every unowned task teaches a lessonA referral that has to be sent twice becomes “nobody cares”. A decision made without consultation becomes “they don't value us”. Operational friction turns into culture.
The good people leave firstWhere there is comfort but no accountability, the best staff eventually decide life is too short — and turning an organisation round after they have gone is far harder.
UHS Champions Journey

Progress to date

UHS is not finished, but it is a different organisation. The challenge has changed because the organisation has changed.

June–July 202536 interviews described fear, burnout and resignation — “Groundhog Day”, issues discussed but never resolved — and a strong “us versus them”. Indicative organisational assessment: 3.5 out of 10.
Oct–Dec 2025An independent 90-day evaluation found warmer hallways, calmer patient encounters and more collaboration across teams. The December Journey Assessment rated the programme's progress 8.0 out of 10: “strong early transformation, not yet fully embedded”.
September 2026UHS has now decided its core values: Compassion, Integrity, Collaboration, Growth and Stewardship. This is a huge achievement. The opportunity is to now make them a lived experience for all. Physicians and supervisors now give specific, sometimes uncomfortable feedback instead of staying silent. The dominant theme has moved from trust to accountability.

What has not changed enough. Referrals, scheduling, staffing and communication still frustrate people. Physicians estimate that 20–30% of their daily activity can involve redoing work that was not completed the first time. Feedback too often disappears without a reply, and some still worry that speaking up carries risk. Physicians and supervisors describe the same problems from opposite sides: each wants to care for patients, and each believes the other is not being held to account.

UHS has made great progress this past 15 months, whatever it may feel like. It is preparation for what comes next.

The way forward

Accountability, with support

Accountability is what UHS staff are asking for. Physicians want to know who owns a problem and why nothing happens when it fails. Supervisors want the same standard applied to everyone around them.

Accountability without support becomes fear; support without accountability becomes avoidance. UHS needs both. The next steps:

One standardFor everyone. Role-neutral accountability, from executive to front desk: raise it, own your part, talk to the right person, help solve it.
Clear ownershipBuilt into role-specific onboarding, competencies and evaluation, so everyone knows what they own and what good looks like.
Close the loopEvery time. Starting with the physicians: here is what you told us, here is what we did, here is what changed.

Once built, it becomes normal. Accountability moves from “It's not my job” to “That's just how we do things here.”

The opportunity

Fix the roof while the sun is shining

Humanity First. Performance Follows.

Look after people first — patients, and the staff who care for them — and performance follows. It is not “be human or perform”: the first is how you get the second.

Union Health Service — comprehensive, compassionate care, cost-effectively. The goal: the patient will be at the heart of everything, held up by three pillars — Every person counts, Caring for the carers, It's who we are — lived through the UHS values of Compassion, Integrity, Collaboration, Growth and Stewardship, on the foundation of the capacity to act for the good of others, rooted in the founding vision of 1955 and the motto Not Too Big To Care.
The next phase

Three areas of focus

1 · People operationsThe infrastructure that helps people lead well: recruitment, role-specific onboarding, a competency framework, evaluation that reflects the values, talent and succession, and organizational design.
2 · People developmentBuilding the accountability culture, with continued development for executives, supervisors, physicians and the front line.
3 · Change managementSupporting people through the Access Center and the EMR change, so the people side is not left behind the technology.

Each depends on the others: development without the systems to back it will not stick, and neither will survive a major change unless people are supported through it.

Humanity First.
Performance Follows.

A personal note. Thank you for the opportunity to share in your journey, the UHS journey, and to contribute towards your vision and future. It has been a true privilege, and we look forward to continuing the journey with you. Our commitment to you and UHS is rock solid: enabling you to become true healthcare champions.

Glen and Steve

1 The inquiry proceeded on those convictions; an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission is pending.

Sources: UK Healthcare: An Opportunity to Inspire a Nation and Beyond (Champions, September 2026), which gives the evidence and primary sources for the UK examples; Union Health Service history; Dr Angelo Creticos, “Is cost-effective comprehensive medical care possible?”, paper presented in Chicago, May 17, 2005; Steve Kelly, UHS State of the Nation, June 2025–September 2026; UHS 90-day review, independent evaluation by Lauren Easterday, EastLight (figures directional, not statistical).

The UK picture. For the full story of UK National Health, what went wrong and what could put it right, read the executive summary of UK Healthcare: An Opportunity to Inspire a Nation and Beyond.

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